Poem by Pietje Kobus

Not despite, you say,because

You’ve been looking in the bathroom mirror

of our Santa Fe adobe house, beneath stained vigas

wearing your orange sports bra

and half-buckled blue jeans

a black-and-white plaid shirt in one hand—for horseback-riding

Was it five summers ago when

I saw you at Seattle’s Cyclops,

wearing a sleeveless golf shirt?

I kept staring at your shoulders,

tan and muscular, diagonal scars

I felt too timid asking about

Aren’t you worried about the age difference?

My mom says, tells her Christian friends

I was looking for a replacement. No,

my fear is dying alone, my means exhausted, becoming

the people I see as I drive along Cerrillos

pushing carts with tattered blankets and frayed satchels

I’m proud to be an old lady, you say,

love me because of my wrinkles

Turning around, my right index finger traces

the lines in your face, grazes

your flat stomach with my left hand,

Because, I whisper, I love you because

Pietje Kobus is an MFA student at the Mississippi University for Women in Columbus. She writes creative non-fiction and poetry, mostly about the long-lasting damage of harmful messages received during childhood. When she is not writing you can find her in Santa Fe, NM playing with her dogs or taking pictures along a trail. Follow here on Instagram @Pietjewrites, on Twitter @Pietje_Pykje, or on her website http://www.pietjekobus.com.

elumish:

Romantic Tension without Abuse

A lot of romance novels and love stories have the failing that the relationship relies on the the tension being some form of “he’s cruel to her, and then at some point he’s less cruel to her because he’s fallen in love with her”. Those often end up having a fair amount of domestic violence or sexual assault in them, but then he, I don’t know, gives her a consensual orgasm or something, so then it’s fine.

If you don’t want to rely on the character and relationship growth being him being less cruel to her and her being more willing to put up with cruelness, here are some other forms of romantic tension that you can have in romance novels:

Forbidden love - basically the oldest romance plot in the world, two people who are in love but can’t be for some reason. There’s the Romeo and Juliet version of this, but there are also a lot of forbidden or at least taboo relationships in the world right now: same-gender relationships, interracial relationships, interreligious relationships, etc.

I’d caution that you should be wary of writing the type of YA “this white girl’s relationship with this white boy is forbidden because society hates love” forbidden love because it’s a bit played out.

Danger- this is the basis of basically every romantic suspense novel: danger is chasing them, and they can’t focus on their relationship because they need to keep themselves and each other safe, but they’re falling in love anyway. This can have the advantage of forcing them alone for long periods of time.

Circumstances plotting against them - this can be two people who keep missing each other, or one of them is engaged to someone they don’t want to be engaged to, or they’re on opposite sides of a business deal. They want to be together, but something keeps getting in the way.

They love each other but have different priorities - think of every advice column where one person wants children and the other doesn’t. Maybe one wants adventure and the other wants to stay at home, or one wants fame while the other wants anonymity. The tension then is then figuring out if they can make it work despite their priorities, or if it will pull them apart.

A lot of little truths and one big lie - this is one of the tricky ones because it can lead into the sort of gaslighting that isn’t good for a healthy relationship. You can look at books like Courtney Milan’s The Duke Who Didn’t for a good version of this, but basically what you want here is a situation where one character has a major secret, but everything else they share about themselves is as true as possible, so the love interest knows them even if they don’t know this secret about them. The tension them becomes about the stress of keeping the secret or the stress of what the secret is itself or the stress of the love interest finding out the secret.

Trust issues because they’ve been burned before - they may be in love, but one character (or both) has significant trust issues that keeps them from fully committing/believing in the other person’s love because they’ve been burned before–by hurtful parents, by a previous unhealthy or abusive relationship, by the loss of a love.

They think it has to be temporary - this is a love story with a set end date–one of them will move at the end, or the job will end, or one of them is dying. Whatever it is, they are going into any sort of relationship knowing that it can’t last, and so they are unwilling to commit fully because of it.

Some says something early on that leads to an ongoing misunderstanding - again, this is one of the potentially tricky ones, but this is one where someone says something stupid or misunderstood, and so they need to figure out their way around this misunderstanding.

They used to have an antagonistic relationship - another tricky one, because it can fall into the “one of them is cruel to the other and now they’re getting over it” or “one of them is a bigot but the other is learning to love them despite it”. There’s a certain level of antagonism that you can’t really get past, like abuse, but there are a lot of ways you can play with this. They could be sports rivals or people on opposites of a business deal or people who just never managed to get along, but now it’s later and they look at each other and think oh. This often goes in the direction of one pining before the other (see: Pride and Prejudice) but it can be them falling in love simultaneously.

Conflicting wants despite same or similar needs can be a source of immense tension, especially if the author deigns to insert a hard edge of dramatic irony. That is to say, the reader knows who wants what, and perhaps even why, but the characters themselves are left to navigate the labyrinth of their relationship with incomplete knowledge.