L.A. Zoe's Blog: L.A. Zoe on Romance, Love, Erotica, and Erotica Romance

The survival of romance as a fiction genre -- not to mention the genre's overwhelming popularity as the largest category of popular fiction -- is a great thing. Not just for us romance writers.

But a positive note of optimism in and for the human species.

As with so many things that are so obviously true, we tend to take it for granted.

When I attended high school, marriage between students was frowned on, but hardly uncommon.

And certainly, after both finished college was generally considered a good time to marry.

But within a few years, I attended numerous screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which starts out making fun of a young couple in love, as they sing about their love in a silly way in a graveyard, symbolizing the death of romantic love.

For decades, I worked for a government social service agency. As part of my job, I routinely asked young people if they were married. They were mostly not college-bound kids. They were the kind of kids who, in my day, were most likely to wind up getting married in high school.

And if I had a dollar for every one who looked at me as though I turned purple, I'd be nearly as rich as Bill Gates.

Many -- probably most -- of them had babies -- but a wife or husband? Are you crazy?

People in the late 20s -- their 30s -- and they thought marriage was idiotic, or not for them, or they were still too young.

And I haven't even mentioned divorce. When I was growing up, divorce was considered utterly scandalous, something to be ashamed of. Of course, that didn't mean every married couple got along well. But it meant they stayed together just to avoid the social ostracism.

By the 1970s, divorce became common. By the end of that decade, the divorce rate was reportedly 50%.

Divorce became not only socially acceptable, but common.

True love and marriage came increasingly under attack in society at large. Conventional love and marriage seemed an anachronism. People had open marriages. Or serial relationships.

In the 1970s, women entered the workplace in enormous numbers. This was a huge shift in society. These women weren't unmarried or spinster teachers, secretaries, librarians, and nurses, but women of all kinds of different professions and jobs, skilled and unskilled. Including married women with employed husbands, and many as determined as their husbands to have a successful career.

This happened somewhat in the early 1940s, when American industry suffered a shortage of men during World War 2, but after American men returned from serving as soldiers in Europe and Asia, Rosie the Riveter laid down her tools and picked up a vacuum cleaner.

What happened in the 1970s was a permanent change in the American economy. Nobody foresees a return to American women as primarily homemakers.

This made marriage and child rearing more difficult, because couples have to work out how to shop, cook, clean house, pick up the kids, and so on.

For some couples, there's the added burden of jobs and careers pulling them apart. He has a secure job in Nashville while her employer wants her to run a factory in Albany for two years.

But for many couples, the second family income seemed worth it. It didn't take long for pay equity to reduce everybody income, so now it takes two paychecks for most families to pay all their bills.

And along came the concept of "friends with benefits." Would I like to know who coined that phrase! Maybe it's better if I don't.

Sure, in a way it's not new. Lots of people have had sex without taking each other seriously as romantic partners, but who liked each other as friends.

But "only" friends? No. I had to feel something beyond friendship, even when I knew -- or didn't intend -- it to be everlasting love.

To me, being friends with benefits is just a surefire formula for somebody -- probably both people -- to get hurt. And to end the friendship.

Maybe it's coincidence, but it was in the early 1970s, when the culture at large seemed to be attacking traditional love, courtship, and marriage, that Harlequin got started in the United States. And Avon published ,.

The romance genre as we know it today has grown as, it often seems, the culture and country look down on romantic love.

Yet that doesn't attract attention because romance is not only a genre of its own, but plays a key role in just about every other genre.

Most thrillers have a romance subplot. Sure, it plays second place to overcoming the danger, but its presence boosts the emotional power of the defeat by the couple of the danger. In The DaVinci Code, Robert Langdon needed Sophie. Same with adventure stories.

It's not so common in cozy mysteries, though the detective may help a young couple in love by proving their innocence. And marrying Harriet boosted the popularity of Dorothy Sayers' Peter Wimsey mysteries.

In hardboiled detective stories, it's traditional to open with the hot blonde visiting the PI's office. Philip Marlowe did manage to avoid love while rescuing many fair ladies. Sam Spade fell in love, but had to turn her in to the police, since she killed his partner (he couldn't let her get away with it).

In westerns, vanquishing the bad guys paved the way for the good guy and gal to marry.

Historical novels often focus on love affairs.

Romance may be least represented in genre science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In some cases, these authors seek to expand the concept of love and marriage.

All right, in one form or another, almost every dedicated fiction fan reads a tremendous number of love stories.

So what's new?

Nothing. Except that if you paid attention only to the culture at large, including many people's bad attitudes and sarcastic opinions, you'd never know romantic love between two people is still prime.

Primal.

We're in love with the idea of falling in love. Including many people who'd hate to admit it.

Including many people who are single or divorced, supposedly burned by true love.

We read fiction to get choked up at the end.

And nothing chokes us up like a two people finding true love.

With the hope it could happen to us.

I recall one of the actors in the trailer for one of Nicholas Sparks' movies saying the story makes you think that, if they can find true love, so can you.

Maybe even rich, handsome movie stars -- who have it so hard, right?

Some years ago, the leaders of the gay and lesbian movements decided to focus their efforts on attaining the right to marry. Not all homosexual men and women agreed with this decision. However, years of hearing how gay people love each other just as much as heterosexual couples do has done more than anything else to erase homophobia in many countries around the world. It's been a way of establishing common ground. They may be sexually attracted to their own gender, but they need love too. Many people respond to that.

The hope of true love keeps people marrying, even a second, third or -- time.

The hope of true love transforms monsters such as vampires and werewolves into "beautiful" creatures who sparkle.

Women who haven't found their true loves read romance to experience it in their fantasies.

Women who have found their true loves read romance to re-experience and celebrate it. And, perhaps, to remember the love even when it's sometimes difficult.

And some men read romance as well.

And many men who don't want their romance "straight," take it diluted by adventure and crime stories.

It's worth remembering marrying for love is not the universal experience of humanity.

Arranged marriages have a long history in many parts of the world, and are still popular.

And in many parts of the world, arranged marriages still are the custom young people are expected to follow -- or face ostracism from their families. Many parents oppose marriage for love a lot more actively than the Fiddler on the Roof.

One country where they are still relatively common is India.

Yet India's popular movie industry -- Bollywood, and other movie-making centers in other parts of the country -- celebrates romantic love.

Many film stories deliberately attack the institution of arranged marriages.

In one famous one, a young man and woman fall in love, but the woman's father wants her to marry the boorish son of the father's old childhood friend. Against the odds, the young man convinces the woman's father to allow her to marry him.

Few Bollywood movies are complete without at least one love scene where the man and woman dance around and sing about their love for each other.

In one successful movie, the young man and young woman have loved each other since infancy. The man's mother refuses to sanction their marriage, and that decision destroys not only the young man and woman, but the man's family.

In another movie, the twist is complex and, from our viewpoint, bizarre.

The young man goes to visit an old teacher. He sees the teacher's beautiful young daughter dancing because she's about to get married. Despite her impending marriage, he falls in love with her.

Disaster! The fiance and family die traveling to the site of the wedding. The stress weakens the teacher's heart. Because he's his daughter's only relative, and he knows he's going to die, he convinces the young man to marry his still-grieving daughter.

The young man is in a weird situation. He loves the woman, so marriage to her would normally solve his problems. By early in the movie he's where most love stories end -- married to the true love of his life.

But, he realizes she doesn't love him. She's still in shock from losing her fiance. She's only marrying him to make the old man happy. And possibly, because a woman alone in India has few good options.

Once at home with her husband, the woman tells him she'll perform her wifely duties such as cooking and cleaning, but she can't ever love him.

(I could be wrong, but I while watching that scene I got the impression she intended to let him know that if he insisted, she would sleep with him. But of course, since she didn't love him, he couldn't expect her to enjoy it, or respond to him.)

In any case, the man is too nice to force unwanted sex on her even though she's his wife, so they sleep apart.

Later, he gets his big chance. She asks him if she can attend lessons in Bollywood dancing some evenings. The super nice guy of all nice guys, he agrees.

Then he gets a barber friend of him to help him make himself over. He ditches his glasses for contacts. Gells his hair up. Changes from his dull work suit to hip clothes.

He joins the dance class as well, and winds up as partners with his wife.

Only he gives her a different name. And looks and acts so different she's fooled. (You can argue about the credibility, but it's still a neat switch on Superman/Clark Kent).

So the rest of the movie plays out the twisted personal dynamics of this strange relationship. The man decides he loves the woman so much he'll take her love for his outgoing, extroverted dancing personality. He'll even leave his Clark Kent boring nebbish husband self behind. As the cool Superman, he asks her to run away with him.

I can't reveal the ending, except of course they win the inevitable dance contest.

And they do find true love with each other.

Audiences wouldn't accept films without that. Not often.

And this was a superstar vehicle.

(By way, Shah Rukh Khan is the male star in all of the above movies. Not all his movies are romantic, but it's what he's best at. And perhaps why he's certainly the most popular actor in Bollywood, and probably the entire world.)

According to Wikipedia, Harlequin sells romance books in 106 markets on six continents. Here where I stay, romance is the most common type of locally published book. And local women readers LOVE Nicholas Sparks. According to the local national bookstore chain, he's their most popular writer.

So, I'm making a point many romance readers and writers take for granted, but shouldn't.

Romance -- and stories in other genres which incorporate romance -- are humanity's plea for love in a world where it seems to be getting harder to find, and harder to old on to, than ever before.

The persistence of arranged marriages, the sophisticated cultural elites' scorn for love, the continuing trend of young people to postpone marriage but not living together, and a thousand other factors making the course of true love difficult.

So, everyone keeping the dream alive, for yourself and others, carry on!