We live in a very romance-oriented world. It’s built into the typical life plan. Go to school, date, get married, start a family. That’s the general expected path for everyone.
But that’s not how life works for everyone. We don’t all find our one true love and get married, for any number of reasons. Maybe we’re happier alone, or we just haven’t had the opportunities to meet anyone, or we’re more focused on a career or travelling. The reasons are endless, and don’t really matter, in the grand scheme of things.
What matters is that society has this preconceived notion of what will make us happy. And that, without fail, involves a lifelong romantic partner.
It’s to be expected, when all the movies we watch and the books we read always have a romantic endpoint. I don’t mean the romantic stories, either, where that’s kind of the point. I mean the fantasy and adventure stories, the ones where the major conflict is about literally anything besides getting the love interest. In these stories, the hero almost always gets the girl at the end of their quest. Even though the story had nothing to do with romance, they bonded through the adventure and now want to settle down happily ever after with one another.
It puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us who don’t have a dragon fighting quest to bond with anyone over.
All these books and movies show us, again and again, though, that we need that lifelong partner to have that happy ever after. That we’re not complete without it. We’ll be grumpy old cat ladies or crotchety old men if we grow up old and alone. Because what examples do we have otherwise? What books can you point to that didn’t have any romance at all? That proved you can age into your golden years by yourself and be perfectly happy that way?
Sometimes you have these amazing experiences with someone, and you don’t fall in love with them. You make friends in college but they aren’t who you want to marry.
Those friendships should be celebrated, too.
That’s why we need more books to show platonic friendships that don’t end in marriage. To have grand adventures where the hero doesn’t get the girl at the end, because that wasn’t the point. There was no distraction on watch because a couple was too busy making out.
But mostly, to show that it is possible to be friends without anything more to it. And that sometimes that’s enough to be happy. That you don’t need to have romance in your life to feel fulfilled.
To be clear, I’m not just advocating for stories where the main character had a chance to date someone and decided it wasn’t working out, though those stories are important, too. I’m shouting from the rooftops to ask for stories that don’t have romance at all. It’s a dragon-fighting quest and that’s what the characters are focused on. They’re not worried about their next date or what that cute elf thinks of them, they need more healing potions before this battle, thanks.
I think we could all benefit from more books that didn’t worry about love interests and setting its characters up with each other. Maybe it would help us be happier with our own lives, especially if we’re struggling in the romance department. Books are often comforting escapes from reality, so it’d be nice to have some escapes from this very romance-oriented society.
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