Belinda Carter borrowed sappy, treacly, impossibly romantic novels from the library - along with books on Civil War history and the plains Indians as cover. If any of her friends - professors, lawyers, doctors, and social activists - had seen what she was reading, she would have been immediately and irrevocably thought of as soft, a girly girl romantic who couldn't be trusted with the truth.
Belinda lived in University Park, a leafy corner of Washington DC, solidly progressive, unbending and unflinching in their hatred for Donald Trump and his right wing, MAGA cabal, and committed to the rise of the black man, the gender spectrum, and world peace. Books like The Flowers for Antoinette had no place in the pantheon of right ideas. They were inane, anti-feminist, idealistic fantasies unworthy of anyone embracing the fight for equality.
Yet half the women of University Park were reading books like this, hidden among more serious non-fiction, kept under wraps, and read late at night. These women were hopeless romantics who had never gotten over their adolescent fantasies of marrying princes and living in castles. Most were careful to choose only those novels which had a historical link. Flowers was set in revolutionary France but had nothing to do with Robespierre or the guillotine but the torrid affair between the namesake of the queen and a British nobleman caught in France like Dickens' Charles Darnay.
If called out for her girlish fantasies, she could always say that the book was not a romance but a historical novel; yet every night she sobbed and sniffled as she read of the loneliness and rejection of Antoinette, her poverty, and her misery. Belinda knew that the story would turn out well - they all did - but she couldn't help empathizing with the young heroine, so much like herself, destitute in love.
'Turn the light off, please, dear', said her husband rolling over to the dark side of the bed - the husband of many years who increasingly paid her no mind, had been unfaithful, and was mindless and unconcerned about her happiness.
This was the fate of many women in University Park whose bright memories of young love persisted well into late middle age and drove them to fictional romance. At least there was that, Belinda, thought, putting down The Chalice of Love.
She smiled at the other patrons of the library looking for books in the 'Adult' section, a parceled off corner of the library for romantic fiction. Adult fiction usually meant pornography, but the head librarian, herself an aficionado of romantic fiction, knew that what women wanted was cover. No professional woman wanted to be seen interested in the treacly stuff usually reserved for housewives in trailers.
The women perusing the Adult section were together in their desire for romance - they were all women who resided in boardrooms, management consulting, or superior court but who could not give up their hopelessly romantic interests. Smiling at each other as they roamed the shelves said, 'We're sisters' another cover for slightly misandrous women who would rather be in a Bavarian palace then next to their husbands.
'Oh, he's gorgeous', said Betsy Farquhar to Belinda over sherry at the Russian Tea Room when a graceful, beautiful young man walked in and sat at the bar. 'I would roll over in a minute for him'.
'No you wouldn't', said her companion. 'Someone always gets hurt'; but that circumspection carried no weight with Belinda whose eagerness for the real thing had built up to a crescendo after emptying the shelves of Little Falls library. Maybe it was time for some romance of her own for a change.
Easier said than done of course, so locked in was she to a high-toned version of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche. Woman was the keeper of the hearth, responsible for family, worth, and happiness. Far be it from Belinda to wander when her children and husband needed her.
The tea room incident only whet her appetite for more imagined romance. If she couldn't find true love herself, she would enjoy reading the stories of women who did.
Professor Hyman Isaacson dean of the psychiatric faculty of the medical school at the University of California, Berkeley had been fascinated by this persistent phenomenon. How could otherwise intelligent women be so drawn into the greatest moneymaking mill ever? Millions of ghost written, predictable tales of impossible romance flew off the shelves and not just to the low end reader. In 2022 he wrote a monograph on his findings:
The mature professional American woman is a rare bird, psychologically speaking. She was brought up by a strong, loving father and had the usual and predictable Freudian sexual attraction to him. The onset of feminism changed the calculus and concluded that these fathers were oppressors, deniers of female legitimacy. The liberated woman must seek her own, independent, sexually confident way.
The conflict arises when this woman seeks adult love. She wants the attention, comfort, and security of men like her father, but has been told to be wary of them; and frustrated, denied, and humbled finds solace in romantic fiction
'Nonsense' was the expected rejoinder from feminist critics who argued that Isaacson was a perfect example of the controlling, misogynist male they had always warned about. He was the immature one, looking for the ideal woman but trapped within his narrow academic carrel.
Yet no matter how much angry women decried the observations of Isaacson and rejected any of the assumptions he made about romantic desire, the shelves of romantic fiction remained stacked, and over half of the borrowers were like Belinda Carter. Businesswoman by day, sobbing, sniffling, vulnerable woman by night.
It was not unusual, the Professor went on to note, that fact and fantasy become indistinguishable. The romantic novel set within a distinct period of history with all its trappings becomes reality, a complete suspension of disbelief. To Belinda the lovers of Antoinette were real French aristocrats who realized her inner worth and rescued her from the streets and loved her forever.
As such Prof. Isaacson continued, romantic fiction for the mature professional woman becomes an addiction, something she cannot do without; and even when actual romance might be in the offing, she turns to fiction instead.
It is no surprise in the academic world that men look at pornography and women read romantic fiction; and if there were ever a cloture to the debate about the differences between men and women, this would be it. Women are desperate for love and romance. Men want only sex. Those crossovers - men who have subscribed to feminism and have been dutiful, responsible, respectful husbands and women who try every position of the Kama Sutra to achieve a Lawrentian epiphany - are few and far between. The record is clear.
Belinda's husband never got the picture and was as dismissive and indifferent as ever despite the growing pile of romance novels by his wife's bedside. He grunted and rolled over on top of her once and a while, she put up with it, and both thought of someone else, she her Prince Charming, and he the busty blonde from Accounting.
Reality bites to be sure, and Belinda eventually slackened off the romance novels and made the elision back to actual history. That righted her ship, and her coordinates were much better aligned. Her professionalism and her emotional interests were in harmony.
However again predictably and common, as she got much older the regrets of a loveless life hit hard, and for comfort, solace, and refuge, she went back to the Adult shelves of the Little Falls library.
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