I believe all stories are love stories, and there are kinds and kinds of love, so I will always write about love, but not necessarily romance.
— Melissa Pritchard
Romance novels satisfy a very specific fantasy of romantic love that seems to be a powerful part of the female psyche.
A real love story is sometimes exhausting. A romance is deliberately constructed to yield a certain result; the ambiguities are trimmed out, so it's neater and more pleasing to our hearts. But you don't live a love story, you live a life.
One of the reasons people like romances is that they're artificially shaped to give a pattern and meaning. It's not as messy as everyday life or as difficult or thorny.
