Why Read Romance?
Whether you’re trying to cut back on your screen time or you’re looking for ways to relax in the great outdoors, picking up a paperback and diving into a good book is a recipe for hours well spent. But with so many great works of literature to chose from, you maybe wondering: why read a romance? Well here are our top five reasons why romance books are the best:
Entertainment - books are, at their core, a form of entertainment and reading should be… fun… duh! In today’s world, we somehow think of books as high brow art and there seems to be a stigma that all books should be educational or classics or masterpieces. Those all have their places for sure, but, reading should be fun. If it feels like a chore, you’re probably not reading the right work. Romances are a fantastic genre because they help remind readers why they’re picked up a book in the first place! If you’re looking for a well written romance novel, try 100 Promises by Meliá Grasska. It’s fun, quirky and a great love story!
Feminism - do you remember seeing shelves of books at the supermarket? This is because women used to not have their own bank accounts and would get an “allowance” from their husbands. Publishers caught on to this and would place romance novels at the grocery store so women could buy books with their grocery money. What were the majority of these novels? Romances! This movement is one of the first ways in which the power of the female demographic was realized in corporate America. And while we’ve come a long way since then, it’s still incredible to support this genre and the women who make it.
The Little Things - romance novels are incredible because they help you romanticize your own life. They remind you about the little things and how important they are.
Perspective - fiction is an incredible genre because it helps you escape your own reality while oftentimes placing issues into a new perspective for the very first time. There’s an adage floating around on social media right now, “fiction has helped me more than any self help book ever has,” and that’s true for a lot of readers! Dive into a romance and see how the MMC and FMC treat each other. Is this something you want to model? Or are you after something completely different?
Standards - another social media adage is “a man written by a woman,” and while romances remind us that the bar for modern dating is… well… on the floor… they also remind us to keep our standards high! And while Gatsby’s parties in the West Egg or Max’s 1000 yellow daisies may feel a tad unrealistic, there are moment in romances that remind us how we should be treated. Clayton Jones’ list of 100 Promises is certainly a reminds us all that it is truly about the little things.