#ReadAroundtheRainbow: How to romance a romance writer

Read Around the Rainbow

As you’re probably aware, #RAtR is a blogging project I am doing with a few friends who also write LGBTQIA romance. You can find everyone by clicking here or on the image to the right.

When we were deciding what topic to pick this month, half of us were really twitchy about this one. It turns out that lots of romance writers are really cynical and don’t much like hearts and flowers in their non-fictional lives. There was a general flurry of oh, I’m not sure I can write about that! And then one of us confessed that they weren’t romantic at all and lots of other people followed suite.

Reader. It was me. I was the first.

A very long time ago I had a couple of screwy relationships where there was a lot of performative romance in public and a lot of unkindness behind closed doors. It turned me off the whole caboodle. It hardens your heart to declarations of love and devotion when a the same time you have someone chucking you over the sofa at home.

Mr AL and I have been married twenty years this year. I didn’t want to get married for the opportunity to float down the aisle on a cloud of orange blossom. I wanted to get married so if I ended up on life support, he’d be the person who got to decide when to turn the switch off. We talked it over for a few months and eventually, he proposed.

I’ve told this story before. It was New Year’s Eve and we were walking home from a friend’s house. It was sleeting sideways and we were both very drunk. He got down on one knee under the No Dogs Fouling sign on a lamppost on a backstreet and popped the question. I was so unsteady on my feet I had to hold on to it to stay upright. The next day we were both so hung over neither of us mentioned it for ages because we weren’t sure we hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. Then the day after that, we went and posted the banns and booked the registry office for three months time. We asked a dozen people along and afterwards we went to the pub.

I wouldn’t have a wedding ring for a decade because I was sure I’d lose it and then become convinced the marriage was jinxed. I’m not sure that’s anything to do with romance though, more paranoia?

To me, romance is the doing of small things, not big performative gestures. It’s a smile across a room full of people when you catch each other’s eye. It’s a bunch of flowers you’ve picked from the garden because the sun was out and they caught your eye and you know they’ll make someone smile. It’s making a sensible supper when you’re both tired and beat and no-one has eaten a vegetable for days. It’s noticing someone’s in pain and finding their medication for them. It’s a proper letter saying you’re missed when your loved one is away from home.

Those are the things that count. Grand gestures are just that, gestures. It’s being there when it counts that’s truly romantic.