Have you noticed how popular love stories are?Visit any blog and you will find at least one story about love. Read any magazine and there will always be a short story dealing with love. More often than not, love stories always seem to have the upper hand in any situation.Try posting a love story in Facebook or blogging about love,it will have more likes and comments than any other post and in a shorter span of time too.
There is no question that romance is the most popular genre. The fact that Mills and Boon alone releases 30 titles a month goes to show how large the reading audience really is, as opposed to merely 15 titles of other combined genre.Pick up any book from a library and there is more chance of it being a love story than anything else.The stories does not even have to do with the typical love between men and women,there are stories revolving around a mother's love, about love between two friends, brotherly love,love in a family and everything else that can possibly be constituted but it always revolve around the idea of love.
Furthermore, no matter what the story is, there is always a short span of romance in each book.Mysteries novels seem to contain love in the form of mysteries, Thrillers often present love as the main motif behind every crime, horror stories deal with the presence of an unfulfilled dead lover and even an abstract piece seem to have some notions about love. For instance, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde mostly deals with aestheticism and art but somewhere along the line, there is the love story between Sibyl and Dorian Gray. Hemingway's 'The Sun also Rises' talks about modernism and detachment yet still has room for a love story. Despite themes of love in these small genres, this hardly even begin to encompass the involvement of love in actual romance stories. Any story about a boy and a girl blatantly evolves around the idea of love.Someone writes a story about an old lady and somehow it ends up telling the story about her 'unfinished' love.One starts a story about a Solider at war and it is about missing his beloved lady.Write a vampire story and even that seem to be about how the vampire fell in love with a human.Stories about Russian mobster, drug addicts, a prostitute, students, etc and somehow it always seem to end on the same note - Love.
Every writer seem to be obsessed with love story. They either write about a past love that they have experienced, an ongoing experience or something that has happened to someone else or sometimes even a story that he/she wishes to avoid. A few years ago there was a huge obsession with happy ending.Pick up any book and it always provided you with a happy ending.It didn't matter how many villains were after the couple, it didn't matter whose family objected their union, it didn't matter how impossible their love was, in the end love conquered all and the writer always provided you with the perfect ending.The prefect example - Twlight! Then came the obsession with 'unfinished' love stories. It usually starts with the tale of an old man or woman reciting the story of her youth, of the dashing man she fell in love with, about his leaving for war, about his promise to return and about how she is still waiting for him to return, thus leaving their love story un-ended.The perfect example - Most of Nicholas sparks's books.
I suppose the charm lies in being able to manipulate the story as one wishes. You are the writers, you can do anything you please with the story. The situation you choose will be your own, the predicament you put your characters in will be yours alone, you can choose a happy ending, you can choose an 'unfinished' one, you can damn well kill the lovers if you want.That is the charm, but then this goes for every other story too I suppose.
Love stories, more often than not, provides a platform for people to carry out their fantasies.People often write their own prefect ideals in the protagonist of the story. One can make your 'hero' to be handsome, daunting and charming, employing all the characters that one, oneself find more appealing and creating your own version of perfect guy.The girl will be beautiful, sweet and prefect presenting your own version of the ideal mate. It is always about one's own mind playing out their own ideals of romance and readers love it, falling for the same old ideals of love and chivalry, searching for their own perfect boy/girl in the pages of some story, hoping the love story comes true for them.
They say female readership is mostly associated with romance but if you are a male and reading this, don't tell me you haven't read a love story and liked it. Don't tell me you haven't written one yourself, be it with hatred or with remembrance. Everyone always does it at least once.Of course, one can always write about politics but there will always be someone who won't be interested, you can write about currents affairs and there will be someone who will be least bothered to read it. But that never seem to be the problem with romance. People always seem to stop and read a love story - some because they can relate, some because they want it to happen to them and some merely because they want to feel it - but people always do read.
We seem obsessed with love stories, with romance. Story telling doesn't seem to function without the theme of love. But why? Why are we so obsessed with this idea of love? What is so special about a love story? Most often these love stories are fictional, portraying the desire for a world full of love that we want to live in, so does that mean the real world we live in doesn't contain love? Are we living in a world which is so out of love that the only place we can find love is in the stories? Furthermore, most characters these love story presents are creations of the writer's mind so does that mean the world is full of jerks that the only perfect version one can find in a man is in the books? Are there no girls who actually equate a boy's ideal love? Most people read love story to escape reality so does that mean that the reality we face is not of a world full of love?People say that one only obsesses over things they don't have so if love exists in the real world, doesn't obsessing over something we already have seem redundant? Why create such a fuss over this idea of love?
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