Monday, October 17, 2005
No One Will Love You The Way I DoI'm listening to H.I.M. today. :) MMMMM.... H.I.M. Anyway, this song, Love You Like I Do, is a classic sort of romancy-angsty song. "No one will love you like I do."
Which had me thinking. (yeah, cover your eyes before the sparks start.)
I had someone tell me that once. Nobody will ever love you the way I do! My response? GOOD! Because the way you love me is BAD!
So often in romance we are expected to tell the tale of a man and a woman for whom there is no other. Soul mates, true love, whatever. It's as if there can really only ever be one person for someone -- or maybe, in the case of menage stories, two people for one person -- but in reality, many people fall in love more than once. I sure did. And though I love my husband the best, he wasn't the first person I loved. Maybe he won't be the last (though I hope so.)
Why this need in romance stories to make it that the primary relationship is the"only" important one? Don't we all learn from our pasts? If a heroine loved before she met the hero, does that lessen the feelings she has for him? Must her love for him lessen the feelings she had for her former lover or husband? After all, just because a relationship ends doesn't have to mean it was bad. It just means it didn't work.
And as far as menage stories go, I think the good ones promote more than just two women for one man or two men for one woman. It should be about the relationship between the three of them, whether the same-sex relationship is sexual or not, a good three-pairing should be about all three people. Nobody wants to be left out in the cold.
Anyway, I'm rambling on about my thoughts here, about why we seem to be expected to write romantic stories that focus solely on the ONE relationship by lessening or even denigrating all the others in the past.
I say we are the sum of our experiences, good and bad, and I like my characters to be the same. Sometimes they find true love for the first time with one person. Sometimes, they find love several times before finding the best fit for the rest of their lives. Hey, sometimes you have to try on a whole lot of jeans before you find the ones you wear to extinction. Along the way you might even have a few pair that feel really good and make your ass look great, but they just don't match up to the ones that you wear so often they mold to your body.
:)
M
