It’s been a long time since the primary genre I spent my time reading in was romance. Now I read and listen to books as I would watch Netflix series: entirely based on my mood, and I consume multiple different works at the same time. Kind of the way we would do homework for multiple subjects each night in high school, just… now I pick my pace and consume what I really need when I have some me-time available.

So, I’ve been surprising myself with back to back audiobooks that have big romance elements. I thought that The Love Hypothesis was going to be too cliché or cheesy for me as it continued, especially as I felt I knew the tropes and archetypes it was setting me up for. But I guess this is how good books and stories can work: they take what’s familiar and offer it to us in a new way.

I’ve been holding my baby longer for naps and bedtime, just so I can keep listening to the “fake” relationship developing between Olive and Adam. Tonight, I found myself rather viscerally feeling that I wanted Adam to finally reveal his emotions to Olive. I was shouting words aloud in my head that I wanted him to shout to her. This is a sweetly pleasureful story that’s becoming one I don’t want to put down. The mark of a good book! Well, I put it down because there are other things I know I need to do to fill my cup tonight, but enjoying the story this much gave me some pause tonight before I head off to do other things…

I enjoy the anticipation of intimacy more than I do reveling in the experience of intimacy - at least when it comes to the moments a story is illustrating. Even somewhat in real life, I’m a nostalgia girl/person. I think I’ve known this about myself ever since we read “Ode On A Grecian Urn” by John Keats my junior year of high school and I realized I wasn’t insane for enjoying and longing for that suspended moment in time just before you get whatever it is you want - that someone had written a poem about it more than a century before I ever read it.

So far, The Love Hypothesis is all about the buildup.

Which, I know that’s the structure of a rom-com:

• Meet-cute
• Spend way too much time together for two people that they don’t think they belong together/like each other
• “Break up” due to an obstacle or big argument
• Big dramatic monologue where one tries to get the other back or professes their feelings
• They reunite / become a real couple

See. Predictable. And the entire structure is about the buildup.

Ross and Rachel. Hitch and Sara Melas. Harry and Sally. Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger. Du-Sik and Hye-Jin in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha. Honestly, that’s the first work that popped into my head as I set my baby down to sleep tonight when I was thinking of how much I enjoy the anticipation/build up to a relationship.

We still haven’t finished Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha because we were enjoying the buildup of Du-Sik and Hye-Jin’s relationship so much that we stalled out once they finally got together.

On a tangent:

That show was captivating our interest, too, because we really liked the third character introduced for a love triangle, Seong-Hyun, the director - and we were also appreciating the way Seong-Hyun and Du-Sik not only respected each other, but also that we liked them both yet somehow weren’t upset when Du-Sik and Hye-Jin get together and that means she can’t be with Seong-Hyun. Instead of being understandably torn in two directions, we found ourselves just enjoying the dynamic of people trying to be kind, wondering about their feelings of affection, and just bopping along this plot of being in a small town with endearing characters in South Korea. (It could be that we were really enjoying this kind of love triangle since my brain had been long burnt out from the mental gymnastics of teaching through the pandemic as an English teacher constantly asked to address current events… and also simultaneously attempting to parent/care for 2-3 small humans under the age of 4…).

Anyways though, my other thought in all of this was contrasting my experience with Verity and The Love Hypothesis.

I know they aren’t in the same genre, the only overlap would be that they contain romances, but Verity is a somewhat morbid, I’ll dare to also say mildly erotica (is it smut?), thriller. There is so much sex in that book, it might belong with the ranks of Game of Thrones (I’ve only watched it) or a Murakami novel (I haven’t read all of his novels by far). I suppose there is a bit of anticipation and buildup between the main character, Lowen, and Jeremy, but there’s pretty much sex every single chapter since we also get Verity’s voice in chapters alternating with Lowen’s.

I’ll be honest that the description of the sex scenes did have, what I’m sure is, their intended effect on me in that it raised some arousal. But as Verity’s twisted psychology and Jeremy’s lack of character development continued, and Verity viewed sex as not only the pinnacle of her relationship with her husband, but also as a measure of her worth, it just felt like I was reading the same twisted sex scene over and over again and I would eventually zone out or let my thoughts wander when listening to those scenes. I may have even skipped to a next chapter when I looked at the time left in a current one and assumed the rest of it was going to be a sex scene.

It just got old.

Even when Jeremy and Lowen finally get together and have sex too, it almost feels like Lowen is more than happy to become Verity in her experience of Jeremy that makes the whole act not only somewhat twisted, but also kind of another regurgitation of the sex scenes prior to it.

I don’t think I really have much experience reading erotica novels, so I don’t know if this book qualifies, and I really don’t know if that’s “what erotica books are like” or not. I have to imagine that good erotica must be like good sex, which [for me] would mean there’s more to it than just the act, and certainly not all of it is about how every time a woman sleeps with a certain man, the amount that her self worth becomes tied to pleasing him increases.

Have I suddenly thrust Verity into the world of The Stepford Wives? Hmm.

Verity distracted from Lowen’s anticipation by eliminating the distance we, as an audience, feel from Jeremy by allowing us to be with him as Verity from the very beginning. I know the story is a thriller, so it’s more focused on having us guess and wonder about what’s really going on; and who killed who; and who is the most messed up character, really, here; and is Lowen safe or not? But I guess things might have felt even more fucked up and twisted, to me, if there was less sex and more space for Lowen to fill in the gaps or populate her imagination of what might have been happening between Jeremy and Verity both in bed and emotionally… herself, rather than us being shown exactly what it was like and then just knowing that as much as Lowen doesn’t want to admit it, she’s just attracted to Jeremy too. (But… why? Other than “there’s just something about him”?).

It also doesn’t help that both Lowen and Verity are authors, they write in the same genre, Lowen is literally taking up the space Verity previously did in her own home and family pretty early in the book. I’ll stop, because I’m guessing if I keep pulling on this thread, there will be a lot more for me to pick apart.

Anticipation. It’s a crucial part of suspense whether that’s in a thriller story, horror flick, early days of a romantic relationship, or a rom-com.

I’m really enjoying The Love Hypothesis and I’m not even ¾ of the way through!

Thanks for entertaining my musings.

❤️‍🔥 Cara