Romances seek the ideal of lifelong married happiness. In reality, many marriages end in divorce, sometimes as many as half. The trend is not completely negative. According to a fascinating scholarly study of marriage and divorce, divorce has been declining since 1970. So has marriage, by the way. Why then do we imagine our romantic … Read more
On Halloween, children and adults run or slink around in costumes, most of them trying to look like superheroes, fairies, or spooks, scary or sexy as they choose. For the last several years, the hottest trends in book covers have been what amount to Halloween settings. Dark and spooky. Sometimes bloody. Often featuring young women … Read more
Throughout history, people have claimed the latest generation is going to the dogs: they haven’t learned good values, they don’t know anything, and they don’t care about anything except shallow pleasures. The advent of television gave rise to a tide of such bemoaning. The advent of the Internet has done the same. Even before these, … Read more
Lately I’ve noticed something: Evidence that today’s young men are romantics. What makes it weird is that we frequently hear critics claim women (and girls) who read romances get unrealistic ideas about the world. These females then try to live their real lives with exaggerated expectations. Romantic tales, people say, are supposedly the origin of … Read more
There are lists of classic plays we all are exhorted to read or see in our lifetime, in order to become literate and cultured. I’m here to tell you that we should pick and choose. Classic plays sometimes just don’t stand the test of time. Uncle Vanya, by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, is world famous. … Read more
Time Magazine does a list of the 100 most influential people on the planet. I’m all for Angela Merkel running Germany, but I’m not feeling her immediate influence. People Magazine has a list of the 100 most beautiful people. The first ten or twenty are familiar names, but most of the people on the list … Read more
The big romance story this week has been the wedding of Britain’s Prince William to Kate Middleton. Numerous people seemed to think it was a terribly romantic event, and of course the media was in a frenzy. How romantic is it really when two people who have been lovers off and on for a decade … Read more
Colin Firth just won the Best Actor Oscar for playing King George VI of England in The King’s Speech. It’s not a romantic, heroic role in the conventional sense, since the king is happily married as the story opens and remains so. His big issue is his stammer. Being thrust into rule because his brother … Read more
The recent demise of the Comics Code Authority reminds me that this self-censoring body was in its time the ONLY such organization in publishing. In the 1950s, amidst the debacle of horror comics coming under Congressional investigation and Frederic Wertham’s sensational, tawdry smear of comic books, Seduction of the Innocent, becoming a bestseller, comic books … Read more
One way to be happy for many new years to come is to make good life decisions. Romance presents us with the opportunity to make both very good and spectacularly bad decisions. Once the first bloom of romance and the fancy wedding day festivities are over, we have to lie in the bed we made. … Read more
