The Problem With HEAs - Happily Ever Afters

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good HEA (happily ever after). However, for me personally, it has to be believable and well-earned or else it falls flat and fake. If the characters’ behaviours fall outside the realm of how I believe real people would act, I disconnect from the story and simply write it off as a fantasy—and not the good kind.

I get that romance novels are about escapism, that they’re not meant to portray reality. However, I find it more frustrating than satisfying to read about things that are so predictable and far-removed from believability. Why? Because I can’t relate to them, and because of that, they don’t make me feel anything.

Many people read romance to disconnect, to experience things they could never experience in real life, to momentarily live in a world where everything is perfect and all ends well. But that’s not why I read romance, and maybe that’s the big difference.

I read romance to feel deep things, burning, depth, passion. I want to see hearts crack open because I want to see what’s inside them. I want to see their grit, their perseverance, their strength. I want to see what who these people really are and what they’re made of. I want to see how far they’ll go and how much they’ll bend before they break. I want to see what they do what they’re shattered on the ground and how they pick themselves back up again.

That’s why I don’t want perfect plastic characters who do exactly what’s expected of them, who perform flawlessly, pleasing each other, crying out in ecstasy every time they’re touched. No. I want to see conflict, clashing, misunderstanding, pain, personality, history. I want to see pieces of myself. I want to see something that I consider to be human, not the mere reconstruction of manipulated emotions and responses that seem as about as genuine as a porno.

I’m currently scouring Audible for romance novels that are different, that touch me in a way that’s genuine, that can take me by surprise, make me cry. I want the characters to jump off the page, not act as mere instruments of the narrative. But so far, I’ve only been disappointed.

When an eighteen-year-old girl gets cheated on by her boyfriend and then falls for her boyfriend’s hot thirty-eight-year old father instead, it normally doesn’t end with a marriage proposal and a HEA. It normally consists of a hot fuck for a few months and then a broken heart, probably on her end, because a relationship with a twenty-year age gap, a teenage girl and a nearly forty-year-old man, normally doesn’t last, for an array of valid reasons. But it does in Birthday Girl by Penelope Douglas.

When a woman takes her girlfriends up on a birthday dare and has a one-night-stand with a sexy stranger, it’s usually sloppy and casual—thrilling but imperfect at best. The hot guy she hooks up with normally doesn’t please her so perfectly, far better than any other man ever has. And he usually doesn’t transform from a hardened commitment-phobe into a responsible and mature partner and the love of her life. But he does in He’s Going Down by Kelly Siskind.

I’ve always wanted to write the book series that I haven’t been able to find. Currently, since I’m focused on romance (in the future I have fantasy and sci-fi in the works), I want a romance that’s sticky as much as it is sexy, that’s conflicting as much as it is captivating, that’s as painful as much as it is pleasurable. I want to feel the gushing of emotion, heart rooted against mind, with the present tortured by the past, with psychology wrapping up into sexuality, with good men and bad boys, with the ones who stay and the ones who leave, with the relationships that are heaven, and the ones that are either hell or the confusing mix of both.

I don’t want a predictable cookie-cutter story with a guaranteed HEA. I want deep, feeling heroine that other women can relate and identify with. I want an unconventional story where there’s no one perfect, magical guy, rather, there’s men of all types, and the heroine has no idea which one is wrong and which one is right or why she wants one of them so badly, even though she couldn’t even tell you if he actually cares about her. As the book series go on, she does get together with ‘The One’, but it’s by no means smooth sailing.

I want to show the nearly forty-year-old man who is as selfish as he is sexy, who won’t change for her, just like she won’t change for him, since both of them cling to clashing values and life perspectives. I want to show the young, hot twenty-something guy whose dirty talk is as hot as the devil, but instead of blowing her mind in bed, he’s a letdown, and even so, she still cries for him when he’s gone.

I want her to find herself, not through the man who saves her, but through the battle in her own heart that she has to learn to win—or learn to lose. I want the books to be about her, not about the perfect, fantasy love, that’s really more like emotional addiction, that doesn’t exist on planet earth. At least it doesn't exist the way that it’s most often portrayed in romance novels, with all the difficult and complicated parts cut out.

Of course, it always includes, without fail, with the construed falling-out, which is about as deep as a kiddy pool and only exists to act as the springboard into the HEA. But there’s no real doubts, no consideration of all the things that could actually tear them apart, like him being twenty years older, like her going off to college and maybe wanting to get to know younger guys or party through a YOLO stage, like him not really wanting to have kids all over again, like the relationship just naturally falling apart, because oftentimes, what we feel at the beginning isn’t really love—it’s simply lust and desire for something new or the thrill of danger and anticipation.

No, these romance novels often only portray the perfection and parallel bliss of the characters who are 110% committed, despite his previous player-like ways, they’re destined for each other and make it to their happily ever after without fail, with zero problems or consequences. There’s no doubts and no reality, just pure, elated acceptance, followed by sweet kisses and fireworks sex. But in my opinion, that’s an unnatural, hacked up version of love, not to mention incredibly predictable, dry and boring, and it’s not at all what I want to portray in this series.

I want to portray love in its full form: messy and rough, with misunderstandings and crying and laughing and falling and flying. I want to breathe life into the story. I want the readers to feel every emotion, to be gutted by every loss and motivated by every progression. I want things to work out in the long run, but maybe not the way the heroine originally planned. I want her to realize her faulty ways of thinking, her immaturity, her toxic cycles and trauma responses. I want her taste in men to change as she changes herself, but I still want her to be at war in her heart and her mind.

That’s why I wrote my story. My romance series is unpredictable as real life because it is real life. It’s my life, based on my diaries. Because back in 2015 in Toronto, as I danced the nights away at Latin clubs, meeting different guys, falling for them, fighting against myself, I often felt as if my life were a sitcom, and the writers were messing with me, always bringing in new characters and plot twists.

I saw beauty in the details, in the reality of it, in the fact that sometimes, the guy just didn’t text back for twelve hours, and when he finally did, his tone was devoid of interest and emotion. Sometimes he didn’t want commitment, and nothing that I did could change that. Sometimes, even though I wanted to believe it was love, I knew that it wasn’t.

Sometimes, the spicy times were unbelievable hot and yet also spiked with sadness, with selfishness, with pain, which only added to the rollercoaster feeling, which only strengthened the trauma bond, which only made me more desperately addicted and trapped in the trauma bond that was tearing me apart.

The goal of my romance series is to show the reality of life and love and to help women get to know themselves and understand their psychological cycles, just like I did. This series is a journey, not a short cut to a happy ending, but the long, hard road less travelled, a road full of hot reality and unpredictable thrills, of digging deeper to find out what lies beneath, of learning who we really are and who we’ve become along the way.