Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

I realized, partially related to Candy’s thoughts on romance cliche, that when the characters get married in the middle of the book, it’s almost a let down for me. I find myself...disappointed. I have to ask myself why: is it because I think the illicitness of sneaking around for clandestine snogging in a Regency is half the fun - the danger that they might get caught - although only rarely is a moment where boobs are free and pants are undone interrupted, so once the hero has gotten to 2nd base and is rounding to 3rd, I kind of know they aren’t going to be discovered and have their naughty naughty escapades cast in the public light of shameful gossip. Adding overt shame to the protagonists’ sexual exploration isn’t a hallmark of many Regencies I’ve read.

So do I get bummed out because the risk, the chance of discovery, no matter how remote, is gone once they are married and in each other’s company so frequently? Is it that the author no longer has to come up with clever scenarios to bring the hero and heroine together? Or is it that the conquest is won, the rake has been tamed, and the bliss of marriage and ever-frequent sex makes for a boring finish to the book, regardless of the conflict being addressed by each character or both?

I will say that this is an issue I have with historicals, not contemporaries. I don’t know that I’ve read too many contemporary romances where the hero and heroine get hitched halfway through and then fight the forces of evil for the rest of the book.

But I have to wonder if my disappointment is evidence of my own compliance with the Disney-fied Happily Ever After ending, with wedding bells seen or implied serving as the ultimate culmination of the romance. Maybe I have learned to expect the story to end at the nuptial canoodling and am bothered when it violates my expectations.

I do get bored with recurring characters from prior novels popping up into later stories, bedecked with wedded bliss and all the fire and spark of vanilla yogurt. Do I expect the same of newly-married couples who are also the protagonists of the story? Or is it the loss of the attraction phase, and the beginning of the attached phase, that loses my interest? I know my favorite element of a well-written romance novel is the attraction between the protagonists, so maybe it’s the end of the zest and the beginning of the rest that tends to let me down a little. (As a married person myself, it’s not like I think the attraction ends after marriage. I’m plenty attracted to my husband!)

Am I the only one with this peculiar expectation? Does marriage take away some of the zest for any of you? Or are there well-written examples that you remember fondly?