I finally had a chance to read the book I spotted on NPR a few weeks ago, Everything I Know about Love I Learned from Romance Novels.  The book's author, Sarah Wendell, is one of the bloggers on a well-known blog, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, so I thought the book would be pretty tongue-in-cheek.

I was surprised to find that it was actually pretty serious.  Oh, there are some funny moments, but on the whole the book is defending romance novels.  That I wasn't expecting.

I have very mixed feelings about the stuff she wrote about in the book.  On one hand, I do agree that accusing romance novels of giving women unrealistic ideas about love is rather like saying that reading crime novels will cause people to go out and commit crimes, or that reading horror will make them violent.  Why are romance readers assumed to be that gullible, while any other kind of reader is acknowledged as being smart enough to be able to tell fantasy apart from real life?  Obviously such an assumption is rather sexist at its core.

I also agree with the book that many women actually learn what they don't want in a significant other by reading romance novels.  Wendell repeatedly makes the point that what is sexy in fiction turns many women off in real life.  I'd like to think that all romance readers are like that, but I suspect it's just that the people who read her blog are more likely to be like that.

I think the problem with romance novels isn't that it gives women unrealistic notions about love, but that it gives teens unrealistic notions about love.  The book largely ignores the fact that teens make up a huge part of the romance novel market.  Adult women may be able to read about a hero and recognize that his traits aren't something that would work in a real-life relationship, but teens are much more impressionable, much less experienced, and in general, much less in touch with reality.

Wendell is right that most heroines in today's romance novels are strong characters, and that is a good thing, as they provide better role models for young women.  But at the same time, romance novels (as well as many other novels, movies, TV shows, etc.) still imply that to be happy and whole, you have to be in a relationship.  That's the message that I dislike.  The problem is, romance novels will never evolve to the point where they don't send that message, because if relationships weren't such a high priority in our society, there wouldn't be any such thing as romance novels -- if you know what I mean.

I don't blame romance novels for all the relationship problems I had in my teens and 20s, but I certainly think it had something to do with why I stuck with guys who were so bad for me.  I thought fighting a lot was normal relationship stuff, and that was at least partly because of how many romance novels I read where the hero and heroine fought like cats and dogs, yet still lived happily ever after in the end.

What about you?  What positive lessons have you learned from reading romance novels, and what do you wish you hadn't learned from them?