The Facts and Fiction of Love

With the arrival of the first days of spring and British Summer Time, the warm weather is hotting things up. And naturally, during this period, articles on relationships fill our screens.

MSN UK has posted an article involving Facebook data that suggests relationships fail most in the summer, while offering advice on how to find love in an hour, with the extra hour of daylight provided by the clocks going forward. But of more long-term interest are MSN articles offering tips to "spring clean" your love life and your health.

Girls go wild in spring

Notably in the health report by MSN are the suggestions I've made already: to make time to clear your mind, as well as your body. The MSN article advises:

Take regular breaks from your computer screen, remove the telly from the bedroom and take a proper lunch break every day to stop your brain from overloading. Meditation, meanwhile, can help to reduce stress, anxiety, improve focus and sleep patterns and even strengthen the immune system - making you feel spring cleaned from the inside out.

And to spring clean your life and your relationship? Well, the article provides an interesting tip to make time for random discovery. It suggests:

It's emotionally demoralising doing the same old thing and this has a negative impact on our outlook. Set yourself a goal of discovering new things in the area you live - like a cafe or pub you've never popped into but walk past all the time. Take this attitude into discovering new things elsewhere in your life; for example, get a friend to come along on a day trip somewhere. Do fun, random things - by putting yourself in new situations it gives you a new outlook.

Changing our mind set, to look at things in a new light is something I often suggest, because love is a powerful aid to discovery. And as a writer of romantic erotica I fully understand the power of love stories, because fiction can be just as influential as the facts. And with erotic fiction becoming increasingly mainstream, it's evidence that we are becoming more open-minded about feeling good.

The favourites of fiction

For those who would mock romantic fiction, some of our greatest classics are love stories. One of my very favourite books, The Great Gatsby, is a love story at its core, which almost always moves me to tears with its revelations about the human heart.

And more often than not, the voyage of self-discovery is a favourite of love stories, because we can't be with another person (at least, not in a healthy way) until we have found ourselves.

Madonna, a pop icon that epitomises self-discovery, has banged more than a buck on promoting this voyage of experimentation. Some say she takes it too far. Over fifty, and it seems she won't be taking a break from pushing the boundaries any time yet. Not if her "Girls Gone Wild" music video from her MDNA album getting banned from YouTube is anything to go by. But why should she? Self-discovery has no age limit.

So, it's no surprise that such an important step in our lives finds its way into so many of our books, whether for adults or teens - but particularly symbolised by the growing popularity of the Young Adult genre in pulp fiction.

The Young Adult genre is essentially concerned with coming of age. By their very nature, these novels take a character from childhood to adulthood, from trying different selves on for size to finding oneself. These novels are usually structured so that the most exciting and important point in the plot, the climax, is also the moment at which the protagonist completes (or makes the novel's most major step on) his or her journey from childhood to adulthood, from indecision to action.

And because of that, I often feel that the climaxes of Young Adult romances, which always seem to be the moment at which the protagonist finally gets with her or his love interest, inadvertently convey the wrong message that we cannot find ourselves until we are with another person. It's almost right, but not quite.

The facts in the fiction of love

We don't necessarily find ourselves when we are with another person - we find ourselves through self-discovery and experimentation; we become or can be ourselves when we find the right person.

Nurturing good relationships, self-improving hobbies when single, meeting soul mates can all help us find ourselves. We are made whole when we know who we are, and we can be more like our true self with the right person. This is the (sometimes fine) distinction between a good story and a bad one; and life imitates art in this very respect.

In good fiction, like in reality, the developing romance is one element of the much larger adventure that each character is living in her or his own life. And it is only one element of the story's climax, which should result from the protagonist's growth.

The right love comes to those who are ready, and appreciate it. Women and men, boys and girls, should need each other to become whole and complete, only after they know just what their complete self actually is. The romance they weave into their tales should be one golden thread in a whole tapestry of real, human experience, which is just as meaningful and exciting, and full of opportunity for women as it is for men.

So girls, it's spring, go wild and get out there! Good romantic fiction helps empower us to live our lives as the star of our own stories, to slay the dragon rather than sleeping in the tower, because our prince might be in the lair waiting to be rescued. For example, in the Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston film "The Bodyguard" they both rescue each other, to slay the demons from their past and present.

That's really the romance of adulthood, the maturity and sophistication that comes with understanding the diversity of human experience, and that every story will be different.

The best fiction helps to shed light on the infinite ways we can find ourselves in this world, to make the growth to adulthood from the spring in our lives so meaningful, so challenging, so incredibly important - and healthy enough to last a lifetime.

Yours in love,