Samantha (Sam) Stone Books

I don’t remember my first romance novel—only that it came from the massive stack of library books my mom always kept on top of the fridge. It was probably a Danielle Steel. Maybe a Jude Deveraux. And, as a twelve-year-old, I was probably not the intended audience.

But I was a voracious reader. If it had words, I devoured it (even the ancient encyclopedia set my parents kept in the living room above the VCR–trust me, it wasn’t particularly useful learning 1950s science or geography).

It turns out that there are a lot of romance novels. Jackpot.

I must’ve read hundreds of them. Danielle Steel. Jude Deveraux. Julie Garwood. Nora Roberts.

Diana Gabladon. Obviously. Those, I own.

The plots, even when not about time-traveling nurses and Scottish warriors, seemed far-fetched and ridiculous, the proposals at the end relatively anticlimactic. I hadn’t even gone through puberty—I was very young and very inexperienced—but I was already convinced that marriage and children weren’t for me (the latter ultimately stuck, even if the former didn’t). These novels did not speak directly to me.

But, I was hooked.

For one main reason: romance novels end happily. Always.

For a kid with a ton of anxiety? Jackpot!

I could crack a new book, a Jane Austen or a Judith McNaught, and know the path forward was rocky but ultimately happy.

For an adult with a ton of climate and pandemic anxiety? There are few other options.

And, according to English professor Pamela Regis, this is a key characteristic of the genre.

Critics love to deride the so-called the so-called “predictability” of romance, forgetting, I suppose, that mysteries are also expected to resolve by the final pages. Misogyny, anyone?

But, in fact, this “predictability” is a strength. It is the contract between authors and readers: a romance story, unlike real life, ends with love. With hope. With promise. You can enter safely.

It is one reason it bugs me when Nicholas Sparks books are listed under Romance (apparently not his choice). Sure, they are beautiful love stories, but they never end happily for anyone, especially unsuspecting readers left heartbroken by his tragic endings (sorry, spoiler alert).

Anyway, I will defend the Happily Ever After (HEA) and Happily For Now (HFN) to the death!

But—and this is an extremely important BUT—we need to start taking our queer friends and comrades more seriously when they critique the ways romance novels work to reinforce homonormative structures and symbols, even as the industry begins to (slowly) include more same-sex and non-traditional pairings. This is an urgent task given the increasing vitriol launched at those who do not conform to the heteropatriarchal structures of modern Western society.

We need to make sure diverse stories are being told and normalized, breaking down restrictive barriers rather than shoring them up. The alternative is ugly and violent.

And, so, humbly, and with tremendous respect for those with more knowledge and experience than me (please help me learn more!), in this blog I want to explore the value of the Happily Ever After, the ways it might marginalize queer relationships, and potential paths forward that respect difference while maintaining the heart and soul of the genre.

MOST IMPORTANTLY (Tl; dr): You deserve love in whatever form that takes. Your stories deserve to be told. I see you.

In Defence of the Happily Ever After (-ish)

For best-selling author Sarah McCoy, “there’s something in our human DNA that seeks the Happily Ever After (HEA). Sure, we dress it up in different names: the American Dream, Shangri-La, Garden of Eden, Elysium, Mecca, Heaven, Zion, Avalon, Valhalla, and the list goes on… [but] these fairytale endings can be traced as far back as the Bronze Age, long before literature had even the language to describe itself.”

We are inclined towards “literary HEAs,” she says, “because readers can’t control the events in their real lives. If we’ve learned anything over the past few pandemic years, it is that the world is relentlessly unpredictable. Chaos will always be just outside our door and all around us, but the HEA provides a sanctuary. In this fictionalized realm, we are protected. There is an omniscient narrator that promises to captain us through the storms to tranquil seas.”

Life in the 21^st Century is legitimately challenging. We are constantly bombarded by seemingly unending and insurmountable crises—overlapping health pandemics, the climate collapse, and rising fascism across the globe. And, as I have argued previously, it is important to escape occasionally and remember what it feels like to love. To hope. To dream.

There is comfort, then, security, in the guarantee that, no matter how big the obstacles, no matter how challenging the circumstances, the lead characters in a romance novel will ultimately achieve Happily Ever After (HEA). Or, at the very least, a Happy For Now (HFN).

It is, McCoy insists, “stress-relieving.”

These endings might be unrealistic, as Rachel Wainz argues about Disney Princesses. “Humans mess up, and the ‘perfect’ endings of these characters do not reflect the inevitable failures and disappointments life will bring young women. I think,” she says, “it’s only fair young girls be presented with a realistic portrayal of life.”

But, for KJ Charles, author of dozens of romance novels, gay and straight, the appeal of the HEA is rooted in “hope. Hope that two people can come together and be better happier humans as a result. Hope that marginalised or disregarded or unhappy people can find love and joy in a hard world; hope that however flawed you are, however scared, however much you feel like a piece of the jigsaw that doesn’t fit, there is a place and a person for whom you are just right; hope for the future.”

Without the Happily Ever After, we are left only with the same uncertainty as the real world. And, be honest, don’t you need a break once in a while?

The Pervasive Homonormativity in Romance

Unfortunately, as Maya Henry explains in the Los Angeles Times, “[r]arely do we see non-cishet people get a happily ever after, and when they do have romantic success, they are often in unhealthy, abusive relationships that are the antithesis of what young people should aspire to have.” This is not the comfort and security queer folks need—or deserve—from fiction.

The concern, though, is not necessarily about the HEA. Rather, it is the romance world’s “undeniable issue with diversity.”

“All genres of media,” she says, “but particularly romances, center largely around cis-gendered, heterosexual characters — or cishet for short… Oftentimes, the only queer representation that non-queer people are exposed to features highly stereotyped, hypersexual, one-dimensional queer characters that either have never-ending trauma from being LGBTQ+ or are poster children for extreme carefreeness.”

Even in 2022, it is incredibly difficult to find complex, nuanced explorations of non-heterosexual characters in most novels. This is a problem for queer and straight readers, both of whom benefit from accurate and positive alternatives to the arbitrary and restrictive boundaries imposed on us by heteropatriarchal society.

The industry is starting to diversify, slowly and painfully, beginning to create space for queer characters, authors, and stories. This is tremendously important work that must continue.

But, it must go further. It must also queer relationships.

In romance novels, explains writer Bethan Mai Rooper, “heteronormative relationships are presented as the remedy to unhappiness — the characters only achieve their ‘happily-ever-after’ when they successfully form (as Bridget [Jones] states) ‘a functional relationship with a responsible adult’ (BJ, 3).”

McCoy insists that the meaning of “happy, ever, and after…is dependent on the interpretation and what we each want to believe those words signify,” theoretically allowing the possibility of non-traditional stories, but, according to academic Neal A. Lester, the very notion of Happily Ever After carries the message that marriage, an historically heterosexual and exclusionary coupling aimed at procreation, is the only result that can or, in fact, should occur at the end of a love story.

Even in more diverse novels, the assumption is generally that “queer people want to be a part of the dominant, mainstream, heterosexual culture… [T]hat all people want to emulate straight monogamous couples.”

This, by definition, is homonormativity: “the political effort to portray gay life as essentially normal – almost the same as normative heterosexuality. The central demand is that gay, lesbian and bisexual people should be able to love on the same terms as straight people.”

In other words, homonormativity means that, to be accepted by mainstream everyone, including straight and queer folk, must desire marriage and children. Anything else is incomprehensible and unacceptable.

Also, as a result, invisible.

But, as the GEEKGIRLCON crew remind us, “Queer relationships are queer not only because the participants are not opposite in terms of rigid, binary understandings of bodies and gender, but because the relationship dynamic that they build and enact is also itself queer.”

The notion of two individuals joined in marriage, even those of the same-sex, is not necessarily desirable, even if available, to the queer community. Instead, they might choose to remain alone, to engage in polyamory, to form complex family units, to couple temporarily, to have children without marrying, or a million different options.

A truly diverse and representative Happily Ever After would provide space for every form of love experienced by humans on planet Earth.

Diversifying the Happily Ever After

“There are so many things,” best-selling author Alexis Hall says, “which heterosexual couples take for granted and which queer people have to fight for that the structures necessary to render a HEA plausible in a queer narrative might be utterly different from those that appear in conventional heterosexual romance.”

We know, he continues, that public romantic gestures are “code for ‘these two people are meant to be together and their relationship will work out fine’ but, for queer people, just having the right to express your romantic interest in public is not a given… It is only possible to believe in a relationship that is founded on something as shaky as a last minute airport dash or a climb up a fire escape or a boombox under a window if you start from the assumption that your relationship is validated and supported by the world you live in. If you can, essentially, take as read your right to love who you want. And the sad truth is, this is a luxury a lot of queer people don’t have.”

Additionally, some queer folks—and, let’s be real, straight folks too—don’t want the big romantic gesture. Or the marriage or the children. Even if it was possible.

Many, and not only within the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, resist what Judith Halberstam calls “reproductive temporality,” the idea that life revolves around the progression through marriage to procreation.

For them—for me—the Happily Ever After might take a different shape: a childless couple, a thrupple, remaining alone, or any other possible combination of human relationships that bring people joy and fulfillment in this life.

“This isn’t to say,” Hall continues, “that HEA endings don’t have a place in queer romance, because they absolutely do. Nor is it to say that because happy endings might look different for some queer people than for some straight people that queer romance is an entirely separate entity from mainstream romance. But to make a happy ending ring true for a queer audience you can’t necessarily rely on the same markers and assumptions that come pre-packaged with a heterosexual relationship. Everybody has the right to a happy ending, but it has to be an ending you can believe in.”

For KJ Charles the key word to define romance “is happy. If a book doesn’t fulfil that by leaving us with the protagonists happy and together (for whatever definition of happy and together works for them) and us hopeful for their future as individuals and as lovers, it is not a romance novel.”

Perhaps, however, the most important words should be: “whatever definition of happy and together works for them.” This, not forced conformity to heteropatriarchal structures, is true equality.

Final note: go read Steven Rowley’s The Guncle. It is freaking brilliant.