Revelation: I suck at romance

I was playing Dragon Age, a video game RPG with wonderful characters and storyline, when it hit me: I was getting really into the romantic part of the game, where you give gifts to people you want to woo and go through detailed dialogue trees with them, when I realized that I had never written anything like this. I don’t disdain love stories, I do enjoy good stories where the girl gets the bumbling, cute paladin in the end. But I just rarely write about the first hesitant, powerful, stages of love.

There’s even a word for that specific stage of love: limerent. A word I heard first from my favorite band, They Might Be Giants (written by John Linnell, for whom I’ve harbored limerence for the past 20 years).

Contrecoup, on the rebound
Contrecoup hurt me again
And the second was worse by far than the first
‘Cause the first one woke my feelings for you
But the contrecoup made my words untrue
And it left me limerent

Which is to say, how it goes
Couched in terms no one knows
And as if the choice were slim
As if there’s no synonym

~”Contrecoup,” by They Might Be Giants

I know Heaven is basically a big love story, but that felt different, as I didn’t write the characters going through falling in love. One was already there and  resigned to their fate, and the other was grudgingly led to realize things they had denied for years. I don’t know; it didn’t feel the same to me. But I know I often shy away from romance in stories, and that needs to change. Gotta work on the weak points, right?

Incidentally, one of my upcoming novels is code-named Limerent because of the rather odd love story I want to tell. Perhaps that will be my challenge.