Writing Romance - A New Model

I was asked the other day if I had lived a great romance like I write about. The inquisitor went on to ask how I could write about romance when I am single. I had shocking answers to both of these questions. Well, for me, they were shocking.

To answer the first question, I suppose we must ask what it is to live a great romance. Does one need to experience the storybook in their physical life? Do they need to walk the plot in their daily experience? Do they need to face the triumph, the tragedy, the love, in their physical being? If the answer to these questions is yes, then I would question, “Who has indeed experienced the great romance?” I would contend that for most, some aspect of romance occurs in a wish, a dream, a hope. I know for me, I have lived a romance. I have had the opportunity to love and be loved. I have experienced compassion unlike any other and have felt the warmth of kindness in the midst of tragedy. Through this, I have hoped and dreamed of passion and embrace, knowing its impact on me in the rapture of the same relationship. I would argue I have known and lived romance, even if in incompleteness.

To this end, I shocked myself with this answer. When I think about my life, I do not initially recognize the romance I have had. It is easy to superficially look at my life and see romantic loss and tragedy with two failed marriages and a few false relationships. Being late in life and just now openly identifying as a transgender lesbian, I have no relationships to look back upon that are reflective of this identity. Yet, when I dig deeper, it is clear that I have known myself, and that despite my outward expression, my inward acceptance has allowed me to embrace romance in its truest form. It is not the experience but rather the acknowledgement of this experience that is lacking.

As for writing about romance when single, I stumbled. My gut response to this question has always been to talk about the desire and imagination we all have for romance in our personal lives. On this occasion, my response was delayed. I realized that I was not writing about my wishes for romance, but rather was writing about my lived experiences in figurative, constructed, and desired, queer and hetero-normative relationships. Having no personal construct to base my ideal queer relationship upon, I was using my past hetero structured models to transpose into what I was imagining a queer relationship might look like. I was then augmenting this to adapt to my desired end state. This constructed image of a relationship was the picture in my mind that had become my reality of a relationship. In a large part, it revolved around safety. When I think about how I started to answer the question, I balked simply because I, in my mind, felt as though there was a solid image of a queer relationship that I desired. This quickly crumbled in my recognition of the flaws I had embodied.

So, now I raise a question to my readers: how do we, as members of the LGBTQ+ community, find, build, and construct healthy queer relationships both in our writing and in our lives? When we have a model of hetero-normative relationships that are portrayed for us both in experience and media, where do we turn to define our experience that is appropriate for our lived experience and lives? How do we break free of that model and build our own stories that represent our needs, desires, wants, and wishes? Perhaps by digging deeper into our pasts, we will find that through having been honest with ourselves, we may have already had those experiences. Now is the time to write romance and live a new model.