A key ingredient of the romance novel is the happy, hopeful ending. In my latest romance, The Stand-Up Groomsman, the main characters end up together, and that’s not a spoiler; it’s a feature of the genre, and it isn’t a bad thing. When you’re in a bad place in your life, as I was when I first started reading romance more than a decade ago, you can still count on the ending of a romance novel. Romance readers enjoy the journey to that ending. The ending is part of what makes them popular.
In some romance novels, a happy ending means marriage and a baby epilogue. But writers need to consider what a happily-ever-after or a happy-for-now looks like for the characters in question. For Vivian Liao, the heroine of The Stand-Up Groomsman, that ending would not include a baby.
Vivian is in her thirties, and she’s always known she didn’t want kids. (She said this in Donut Fall in Love, my previous book with Berkley.) She essentially raised her younger siblings, and she has no interest in doing that again. I know some people do change their mind, maybe when they meet the right partner, but Vivian doesn’t, and I think it’s important to show child-free characters getting their happy endings. I’m not going to share every aspect of the ending (you can read the book to find out!) but known this: it’s happy, and there are no plans for children.
I have another romance in which the ending, in addition to being explicitly baby-free, involves the hero and heroine not sharing a bedroom. They live together, but they have separate bedrooms. The heroine likes having her own space, and she frequently struggles to sleep when sharing a bed. Separate bedrooms are often seen as a sign of a failing marriage, though not everyone likes sharing a bed on a daily basis. And marriage is important to some people, but not to others.
I don’t think we need to broaden the definition of the romance genre to include endings that aren’t uplifting. A novel with the ending of Romeo and Juliet? That’s a tragedy, not a romance. But there is a place for a variety of happily-ever-afters. Yes, a romance can be a fantasy…but we don’t all have the same fantasies. The hero of The Stand-Up Groomsman, Melvin Lee, may not be everyone’s fantasy, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t perfect for Vivian, and that’s what I want readers to believe.
She can find love, and so can you, if that’s what you desire.
The Stand-Up Groomsman is available from Amazon and Bookshop.
Read an excerpt from The Stand-Up Groomsman.