1. notleia says:

    Y’know what I’d like to see as a change of pace for a romance? Shy nerd boy who is pursued by a girl who is not a manic pixie dream girl.

    Also, just flipping the girl/guy script would make most of the cliches funny and 90% less creepy.

    Girl uses cheesy pickup line on a dude with a crooked smile. “Did it hurt, when you fell from heaven?”

    Wife pulls up car to pick up husband and catcalls out the window, “Hey, baby, nice butt! Wanna come home with me?”

    • I like flipping the script/plot stereotypes between the guy and girl chars sometimes. Not even just with romance, but other things. Like…I dunno. Usually a lot of the dark, mysterious, jaded chars looking for redemption tend to be male, but I want to write some some day that are female.

  2. notleia says:

    This is kinda related to the topic of romance that I focused on, but kinda different. This is an article about the isolation from community that marriage produces. Or that we’re putting all our expectations of belonging and companionship into the basket labeled “marriage” and it doesn’t turn out well. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/07/case-against-marriage/591973/

    I admit, I’ve made use of the myth of married independence to get the heck off the farm, which was isolating in its own way, but if I’d had support outside my nuclear family and had opportunities to get where I wanted without having to jump through hoops…

    Don’t get me wrong, I’d still be with my dude — he is one of my favorite people. Also, we’ve moved cross-country to get away from the dysfunctional aspects of both his family and mine, so it’s not like extended family support is fraught-free. It’s just…there’s a lot of dumb in these expectations, but I can also see their usefulness in some situations and have taken advantage of them myself. I’m also having an existentialism of What Could Have Happened if I’d been able to stay with extended family rather than be stuck on the farm.

    • At times like these, I wonder if you’re a lot more extroverted than you think :p

      It’s really just how people handle it, honestly. Early on in college I was reading up on relationship advice stuff, and one of the things I heard in some form or another from a few Christian relationship class things was that it was important to have friends (mainly/especially of the same gender) outside of one’s marriage.

      In a lot of ways…I dunno. I don’t know how living with a significant other long term would be less isolating than being married. Never been in either situation, but to an extent if I lived on my own I’d probably be more isolated since socializing is far from my first instinct. I like people, but I need lots of space and I almost forget to hang out with people. Marriage would ensure I talked to at least one person regularly, and would probably make me more social since I’d sort of be absorbing his social circle and adding it to mine. That said, either way, people should build their own social circles. But that’s a decision each individual makes. And marriage would rarely ensure the outcome either way. If marriage causes someone to have cruddy expectations, though, the person just needs to work on their expectations.

What do you think?