I'm Becoming a Romantic in My Old Age

I’ve never actually thought of myself as a romantic. Apart from a period spent wallowing in Sweet Valley High novels that is probably best left unremembered now, I wasn’t overly interested in love stories as a teenager.

But I find that these days I’m more interested in a well-constructed romantic plot line, and more likely to get attached to stories that do this well.

(This excludes romance novels generally, although I do have an embarrassingly large collection of Georgette Heyer novels. I can’t actually remember why I started reading Heyer; I think it was a reaction to reading Lois McMaster Bujold, although I gave up on her after reading the two-novel anthology Cordelia’s Honour, from which I took the lesson that one never goes shopping with Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan. But I do have almost all of Heyer’s Regency romances; I read them while I was completing my M.Phil. on Lady Caroline Lamb’s novels—it was a way of pretending I was researching while I was just lying around reading. They’re variable in quality, but generally fun. But that’s not the sort of thing I“m talking about here.)

Basically, I’ve become a sucker for a happy ending.

And I’ve developed a strangely conservative streak. I’ve never been particularly interested in marriage for myself—apparently, you’re not a real girl if you haven’t been planning your wedding from age 11, but such is life—and I’m not married now; Nick, apparently, fancies living an alternative lifestyle—or at least about as alternative as you get when you’re white, middle-class, and straight—so here we are.

But I want my favourite characters to get married. I don’t know if it’s exactly conservatism, or if I just want to see them safely fettered so I don’t have to worry about the ups and downs of their relationships any more, but I’m a sucker for a book or television wedding.

Some of this stems from early reading: Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying without the “Reader, I married him” endings. But it’s getting more pronounced.

Partly, I think Fables is to blame for this. Of the 70-odd issues I’ve read to date—I haven’t read the most recent one yet—the two story arcs that really stand out for me from a continually outstanding series are the Boy-Blue-focused Homelands and the Flycatcher-centric The Good Prince, both of which explore the diasporic aspect of the world building and showcase Bill Willingham’s ability to find and exploit obscure source material.

But what sucked me in to begin with was the relationship between Bigby Wolf and Snow White. It didn’t help, of course, that the third trade ended on a cliffhanger for this relationship. I discovered Fables when I was given the first three trades for my 30th birthday so, when I read the three arcs back to back a couple of days later, I was left wondering about where it was going and spent the next fortnight—in between frantic, last-minute Christmas shopping—searching Brisbane’s comic-book stores for the next three trades.

One of those trades was Homelands, which had nothing to do with the Bigby-Snow relationship, but a large part of my impulse was the desire to get to some sort of happy ending.

Maybe romantics develop naturally from people like me, who were lucky enough to find their life partners early in life and live happily ever after (minus the small pinpricks of wondering why one’s beloved insists on leaving the electric kettle on the bench instead of putting it back on the rest). I don’t know.

But I do know that tragic love stories don’t satisfy me these days. I’d rather read a beautifully written tragic story than a prosaic or poor happy one. But these days, what I want for my leisure reading is a beautifully written happy ending.