I love reading online and often I find myself unable to pull away once I’ve started reading an article or two. But I’ve also noticed I spend a lot of time reading personal stories of heartbreak and growth, stories that make me say, “what the…”, and how-to articles. Very little happily-ever-after (we writers just call it HEA) in what I read on a daily basis.

So, why do I write romance when I read so much other stuff, right? For that matter, why do we write romance at all?

Romance writers hear all the naysayers and the pseudo-experts who think romance novelists are destroying real relationships with our unrealistic expectations of love. We’ve dealt with the scorn and snide remarks and general unpleasantness. You would think we were kicking puppies the way we’re treated.

Yet, we’re still writing because when the world feels like it’s going to hell in a hand-basket because we know what the naysayers don’t: Somebody needs to hit the brakes and remind the world that love is a thing. Love is an important part of life and our development as human beings.

When everyone is down, love is up.

No one ever said romance novels are literal interpretations of love. (If it’s a true story don’t call it a novel.) A romance is a trope with a happy-ever-after (HEA) ending. It’s a relationship story that, no matter how many twists and turns, ends up right-side-up. A sure thing. Guarantee that love will win. Hope. Happiness.

Love is the opposite of what we’ve learned to expect.

I didn’t write my first romance until after I’d written two dark, mysterious suspense novels with tortured heroines. If you’ve ever spent hours reading a dark book you know that immersion in that story takes over. Creating such a story is even more intense, and it’s even harder to get it out of your head. So I decided to write a romance as a sort of palate-cleanser before starting my next deep, dark tome.

That’s when I realized people read romance to cleanse the palate of everyday life.

We don’t need to read scary things to be plunged into darkness these days, all we have to do is watch the news. I used to watch the evening national, the news channels, the local news, and read a good bit of HuffPost every day. But then I noticed I woke up in a bad mood and went to bed the same. You know what picks me up out of that funk? Writing romance. Happy endings and all that.

Why do we believe in romance?

Because there has to be a point of life beyond going from day-to-day fearing whatever is to come next. It’s kind of like faith. It used to be super easy for me to expect the worst in every life situation, even when the worst hadn’t happened. I learned that faith is about doing the exact opposite; it’s about expecting the best in every life situation, even when the best hasn’t yet happened.

It’s easy to expect relationships, life and love to fail. Living and staying in love can be hard. When you expect the failure, you can’t be disappointed. And as we all know, validation of that belief only leads to unintentionally seeking even more and more validation. Being right means being hopeless. It’s a pretty miserable way to live.

But to do the hard thing, to expect HEA, puts the onus on us. When life if tough, we find the joy or work to get it. Bad relationships; we decide to work to make them better or leave them behind (because maybe we’ve been tossing our pearls to swine). A love fail? Sad, but we have a mindset that the right love will come along.

HEA isn’t just a trope, it’s a lifestyle. And a healthy one, at that.

We, the lovers of romance, may seem like hopeless romantics to some. But what would you rather be? The person in the room who is certain the bad stuff is coming, and eager to spread their misery? Or the person in the room who is certain that whatever bad stuff comes, things will still be okay. We’ll find a way, somehow. As long as we’re standing, love is with us. Which would you rather be?

That’s why we believe in romance.

Why do we write romance?

We write romance because just like misery can be contagious, so can happiness. Happily-ever-after isn’t something you can believe if you’ve conditioned your coping muscle to expect the worst or to be on the defense from impending pain.

You can’t thrive in a relationship—or in life–mired in hopelessness.

To have love we all have to condition ourselves to be vulnerable to the possibility of it. To be open to the notion that it exists no matter who, what, where we are or how low we feel.

If a romance novel has one job to do, I’d say it’s to soften us up, just a little bit, to the possibility of HEA. Like that little tenderizer mallet we use to break down tough meat. We need to break our defenses just a little bit here and there to remind us what softness looks like in a world that’s sometimes too hard to bear.

The beauty of a romance novel

You can decide what type, how much and what manner of romance novel works for you. Sometimes you need a little bump to get you through the week, maybe a short, fun novella will do. Or, it could be that life was extra hard this month and you need an extra-large dose of impossibly fantastic love to raise you out of that funk. Romance is available in small, manageable bites or heavy-hitting tales that will take you all over the world. You can take as many as you need, as often as you want. And no one is hurt in the process.

To those who still insist romance novels are pushing impossible standards, I ask you to reconsider. It’s not about convince readers to believe in the impossible. It’s about asking readers to believe at least as much in HEA as they believe in inevitable hopelessness. It’s about believing in something other than the craziness of the world around us.

If you enjoy romance novels–or could never do it–I’d love to hear why.