Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.

I’ve decided that romance novels should be moved to a different section of the bookstore. I feel that they would be more appropriately placed right smack dab in the middle of fantasy, because let’s face it, romance authors are masters at putting fantasies on the page. Every woman, whether she is plain or pretty, fat or fat free, finds the love of a successful, desirable, wonderful and fantastic fantasy man in every book. Someone who is not only good-looking but comes equipped with a big bank account and an even bigger heart. Have all the fictional men I’ve read about ruined me for romance with a real man?? Most definitely. But you know what they say: The first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem. My problem is that I want an ideal that no real man will ever live up to. I’m picky. Shallow even. Everyone says that I’ll find love when I least expect it. In romance novels this is most certainly true. They never expect it in the beginning and then bam! It smacks the unwitting lovebirds right in the kisser. Literally. Why can’t life be like a romance novel? A funny one, not one of the aforementioned Fabio-on-the-cover novels; I’m not a masochist. I want life to be like a light and frothy romance novel where the worst thing that happens to you is you get caught in a rainstorm outside an inn that only has one room available and (gasp!) the room only has one bed! Awkwardness ensues, ends in ruination, forced marriage and happily ever after. Not that I specifically want something like that to happen… but even good girls like a little ruination every now and again. Just kidding. Maybe. Romance novels are meant to be about an ideal, they provide an escape from life’s all too real disappointments, but its important to have those feelings of disappointment because it means you’re really living. When that story is done you have the opportunity to go and live a new one, which one can only hope, will be better than the last. A story rife ruination and sparse in disappointment.