How My Romance-Poetry Series Shatters the Prince Charming Cliche

You know the story: good girl meets bad boy, bad boy is, in fact, a sexy and smart-mouthed bad boy—until he isn’t—about two thirds of the way through the book, he makes a 180 degree and often completely out-of-character turn around and becomes everything the heroine always wanted. He’s now a perfect gentleman, as dependable as a robot with an implanted heart of gold, with zero character or history of his own, since all of his problems and drama, and oftentimes personality, simply evaporated for the sake of his new girlfriend and the novel’s happy ending.

This is what I call The Prince Charming Cliche, the guaranteed “HEA” (Happily Ever After) often advertised directly in the book’s description—the promise that no matter what, these two characters will end up together and everything will be gorgeous and happy and squeaky clean, which often results in the male love interest becoming a completely different person for the heroine at the end of the book.

First of all, I consider it downright unattractive. I wouldn’t want to be with a man who changes everything about himself for me in the blink of an eye. In my eyes, any love interest who is supposed to be badass automatically loses all merit if he goes “bi-polar”, perfect and subdued and well-behaved in order to be with the heroine.

This is not love, nor is it healthy, nor is it sexy—at least not to me. I want a badass alpha who stays true to himself, whether or not that means that he gets to be with the heroine in the end. I want someone who defends his values, whether his values are that of a gentleman or than of a villain. This type of love interest is actually incredibly difficult to find, and to this day, I have very few examples, but here are two love interests who stayed true to themselves and will forever have my respect, despite their book fates:

1) Gale Hawthorne of The Hunger Games. I have many complaints about this series, but Gale isn’t one of them. For once in modern-day dystopian novel history, here is a love interest who actually has balls, who stands up for what he believes, who has a purpose in life outside of slaving away for the heroine’s attention. He’s set on saving his town, on rebelling against the government, and though he loves Katniss with all his heart, he will not negate his life goals for her by abandoning their people and running away with her. He is a complete entity without her, and though he wants her, he doesn’t need her to survive.

However, as you probably know, Katniss ends up choosing Peeta, also known as “the boy with the bread”, who, in my humble and personal opinion, never had a backbone in his life or a sexy bone in his body. Rather, he’s had an unhealthy obsession with Katniss from childhood, and he has no life purpose or meaning outside of her. I would often refer to Peeta as being “softer than his loaves of bread” because there is nothing in his history or in the entire trilogy to show that he himself is his own entity outside of his pursuit of Katniss. And while some loyal fans may call that kind of behaviour romantic and heroic, I call it bland, predictable and completely void of sex appeal.

2) Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights. He is the reason that Wuthering Heights is one of my all-time favourite books. For me, Heathcliff is the ultimate bad-boy, not the contemporary kind that transforms into a pleasing and subordinate being for the heroine, but the kind of bad boy who means business, who doesn’t care what anyone thinks, who stands rock solid and goes down with the ship of his soul’s darkness and revenge.

Heathcliff loves Catherine with a burning passion, and yet, his soul is tainted and bitter, and he follows his twisted values to the end, committing horrendous acts against Catherine’s family in the name of revenge. Every action, down to his continued vengeance against the family’s second generation, is true to his character. He was never a man of particularly noble character, but he stays consistent to his values every page of the book. He is driven by his goals, blinded by his hate, and despite his atrocities, his wild and immoveable soul entranced me from start to finish.

This is what I to be both sexy and believable, a love interest with a life and ambition of his own, who goes after his goals just as fiercely as he goes after the heroine. And sometimes, he can’t get it all.

My books are slightly different since my romance-poetry series is a real-life story. I didn’t create these characters, I simply catalogued them through my romantic adventures, their roles in my emotional addiction, obsession, inner child wounds and trauma bonds, aka drinks and sexy-time followed by depressive lows and feeling alone until the next high. And while none of the love interests in my story reach the extent of Heathcliff’s darkness, nine times out of ten, I found myself attracted to smooth and confident, self-sufficient men who were emotionally unavailable and not in any way attached to or reliant on me. They defied the Prince Charming Cliche.

I was the one who was revolving around them like the earth spinning around the sun. I was drawn in to their freedom and allure, losing my own entity and life goals in exchange for a few scant text messages and drunken romps.

While my book character slowly starts sorting through her cycles and piecing together the psychology behind her self-destructive patterns and co-dependent behaviour, the male love interests stay true to their values and life goals. They have histories and futures of their own, and they don’t throw that away for the heroine. They don’t sacrifice themselves in the name of love or change into bland versions of themselves to be with her. No—they push back when she tries to change them, they dive deeper into themselves and distance themselves in order to stay true to themselves.

Regardless of whether the male love interests are objectively good or caring partners, the fact that they don’t betray themselves to be with someone else is an important theme that I want to bring attention to. I want to see more novels where the heroine and the love interest have problems or a toxic relationship or don’t end up together because their values or life perspectives and directions clash, because they stay true to themselves and choose a more painful yet healthier path instead of clinging to each other in the toxic chokehold of emotional addiction.

My series is ultimately about finding yourself, discovering your own values and learning to be yourself, even if that means you’ll lose someone you think you love. And only then, months or years later, you may see, that actually, it wasn’t love, it was the twisted psychology of your internal cycles and childhood traumas spiked with sex, dopamine and fear. And then, if you keep going down the rocky and rewarding path of self discovery, you might find out what true love is, both for yourself and for someone else.

That’s why I wrote this series, not with the guarantee of a HEA, but with the guarantee of true-to-life, conflicted characters, wracked with pleasure and pain. I offer the guarantee of reality, the wild and desperate hope to escape the matrix of the mind, the traumas and the past, to stand up for ourselves and to discover who we really are.

Most of the time, we have many more plot-twists before the HEA (if it even arrives), and the Prince Charming is nothing like he appears to be in romance novels. He’s not as physically flawless (that’s a whole other blog post) or as mentally malleable (thank God). Real life, love and relationships are so much more complicated, more painful, more confusing. They’re also much more beautiful, more unique, more liberating.

Which would you prefer?