It will come as no surprise to those who know me when I say I believe friendship is a key component of a long-lasting relationship. After all, I married my best friend. He was the boy I met in high school, when I was a 17-year-old sophomore, and he was a 15-year-old freshman. Now, as a woman of forty-three, married twenty-two years to my best friend, I’ve known him more years than I haven’t, and our love has only reinforced my belief in the importance of friendship in a person’s love life.
Passion is thrilling and wonderful, and important in its own right…but friendship is a cornerstone of the best, healthy relationships. Over the course of my life, I’ve had a number of challenges thrown my way: from battling infertility, to spending 17 weeks on bedrest during a complicated twin pregnancy, to finding myself the mother of a severely disabled child, and our family struggling with poverty that was a product of medical debt, I have a reinforced value of having a friend at your side through it all. Someone who can make you laugh when times feel impossible or hold you while you cry—or who knows you enough to also know what you need in those given moments. Just as important, a friend is one makes you smile, even when life isn’t impossible. They are the person who not only understands your passions and interests (for me that has always been writing) …but who is fully engaged in conversations about them. (My husband never fails to talk plots with me and offer up some hilarious—though very much appreciated and adorable ideas, about romance storylines.) A best friend is someone whom you can speak with, about anything; confiding your hopes and your fears and the dreams you carry and know that you will be fully supported.
These fundamental views on friendship and love inform so much of my writing. Desperately Seeking a Duchess, my latest novel with Berkley Penguin Random House features the charming, roguish, Courtland Balfour, Duke of St. James and Cailin Audley; a duke’s illegitimate daughter, born in a mining town. In their upbringing and their backgrounds, these are two people who come from completely different worlds, and yet, from the instant they meet, they connect over shared interests. Yes, there is of course, sizzling chemistry between them, but Courtland and Cailin truly forge a friendship first. They bond over their appreciation of natural history. They connect in their values about family. And most importantly—they communicate with one another.
Often in romance novels, we call it a slow-burn. But I don’t think it’s that, at all. I believe the more gradual romantic relationship we see unfold between Cailin and Courtland, and the ‘slow burn’ trope in general, is the truest depiction of what most healthy relationships, in fact are. Theirs isn’t just a sexual relationship born of desire, but rather, it’s a love affair born of two people who know each other in every way that is important—and a friendship, which leads to a very natural, beautiful romantic relationship.
Desperately Seeking a Duchess is available from Amazon and Bookshop.