Romantic Inspiration and why Larissa writes fantasy romance novels
Love finds us organically and spontaneously and it all ends up absolutely flawless. Doesn’t it? Turns out, real life isn’t exactly full of love and romance novels.
Most of us have to keep on trying after love fails over and over again. Usually, we have to figure out how to be happy in our own lives first. We need self love to find romantic love–and I needed it to find my inspiration. Even when love does manage to find us and everything is going so well–there are fights and disagreements. Financial or professional problems. Nothing about easy love is ever easy.
How may times do we try to find love?
A dozen? A hundred? And sometimes, even though we try our hardest, love just doesn’t work. I suppose I could write about those lives, and I know there are romance authors who do. Maybe every story doesn’t have to have a happy ending. Every love doesn’t have to be forever, does it?
“Here she comes a walkin’ talkin’ true love
George Straight
Sayin’ I been lookin’ for you love
Surprise your new love has arrived
Out of the blue clear sky”
For me, romance literature, “chick lit,” or as some say “girl porn” exists to give lonely, broken girls hope. If you look deep into those stories, you don’t see romantic inspiration at every turn–and if you did the story would be dull. Truthfully, romance novels taught me bumps in the road are normal. Have faith, they hinted, because all those authors writing all those books about happy endings can’t possibly all be delusional, right?
Remember, love doesn’t always look like a romance novel.
In reality, you might find someone late in life you met online or someone you chatted up in a coffee house. A guy you couldn’t stop texting at 3 am. The most unexpected someone in the world just happened to pop up in your inbox one day and…. you couldn’t imagine your life without him.
What you get might not be the romance novel perfection you grew up on as a lonely college student driving an hour to school everyday. However, that’s the beauty of the real thing, it doesn’t have to be. Basically, too much perfection would be uninteresting.
Love might sit beside you while they play video games and you draw in a notebook. It might look like hanging out with your favorite human and watching bad 90s reruns when the world is too much. Your version of love might not be cuddling all the time and holding hands at the grocery store, a perfect sex life, and all the orgasms in the fiction section of the library. ( Maybe it is! ). Remember, no matter how amazing the sex is, real love isn’t about sex. Really, it’s about caring for someone with so much certainty you couldn’t imagine being with anyone else. Ever.
Luckily, my love story was all that and getting married on a beach in Maui by a hippie in a sundress about ten minutes before the sun dropped into the ocean with only a cousin, his fiancé, and a photographer and it was perfect.
It doesn’t have to be perfect.
You see, I didn’t mention the food poisoning on my wedding night and dehydration and backwards jet lag and cramming my way-too-tall husband in coach on an overnight flight with a screaming infant for 10 hours. Despite all that, he still loved me the next morning and the morning after. He also gave me the window seat for my second-ever flight on an airplane so I could look down at all the places I’d never seen.
You see, after I had already given up I got my happy ending at 38 years young on a beach in Hawaii.
I’d spent all my adult life reading books about love and hoping. Now I’m writing those books for the girl I had been.
In reality, love is as much about caution as it is hope.
Take your time to make the right decisions, prioritize the self love too, don’t be fooled by the bedroom, look for the red flags, but don’t ever stop hoping, my dears. It happens. Love, like books, can become Real.
Yours with love and gratitude,
LMJ