As I mentioned in my last post, the religion I was raised in and the marriage I spent 19 years in drastically shaped my view of relationships and what they should and shouldn’t look like, as well as what should and shouldn’t be tolerated while in one. That influenced my writing by coloring how I portrayed relationships, both good and bad.
Things I thought were positive aspects, I have realized since, came off as demanding or manipulative. Certain interactions that I portrayed as negative, such as challenging a partner when views differed or standing up to someone and holding their ground, are perfectly normal parts of navigating a partnership.
While my current husband and I were dating, he read several of my books and we had multiple enlightening conversations about the relationships I wrote for my characters. It had already been several years since I’d really done any writing at that point, which I think helped me look at things more objectively. My books felt like part of my past—a part I didn’t quite know how to revive into the life I was rebuilding.
Before my divorce, my mental health had been deteriorating and I was not in a good place the last few years of my marriage. In addition to years of unhappiness and stress, several major negative experiences had shaken me profoundly. I knew I needed to make a change, but I didn’t know how and I wasn’t strong enough at that point to even see a path forward.
It took a lot for me to seek help and I felt a lot of shame and embarrassment over needing therapy. I’d always been a doer, a fixer, and get-things-done-and-dealt-with kind of person. Having to go to my doctor and then a therapist and admit that I wanted to disappear and was having suicidal ideations just about broke me.
But it also saved me.
Therapy taught me a lot about myself and what I wanted out of life for me and my kids. Seeing the negative effects my kids were experiencing was what finally pushed me to get help. I needed to gain strength to be there for them and help them heal. I learned about healthy boundaries, that it was okay to have big feelings, that there were ways to manage those big emotions when they threatened to overwhelm, and about mechanisms to cope with stress in healthier ways.
While I was learning how to manage my emotions and stress better, I slowly began to realize that the relationship I was in was not okay and was never going to change. Leaving the church had opened up the possibility that I didn’t have to stay in a bad situation forever, but developing inner strength to stand up for what I was learning was right in a relationship was what freed me to finally end things.
Because I had spent my childhood watching an unhealthy relationship between my parents, then spent five years in the middle of their never-ending divorce proceeding, and had followed their example into a similar relationship, I had no idea what a solid, respectful, healthy relationship looked like when I was writing romances.
In some ways, that probably helped me created flawed characters, but they were flawed in ways I couldn’t see at the time. Looking back at some of those stories, the endings or how characters arrived at their endings aren’t always what I would write now. Flawed characters are important, and I will keep writing them, but that works so much better when it’s intentional and not born from misguided ideas about what relationships should be.
As I go back through my old books, I will make changes where needed to be more intentional in how I craft flawed characters and how they learn and grow in order to achieve the ending they want. Having been through that process myself gives me a lot of starting points for new stories as well, and being in a wonderfully supportive and healthy relationship now guides me in helping characters find that as well (because I love a good HEA).
There will always be those who dislike romance, either because it is often too formulaic or seems trivial, but relationships (romantic or not) are a key part of being human. They can be what sustains you or what tears you down. We learn important lessons from who we put our trust in to safeguard our hearts and dreams for the future. Some of those lessons are brutal. Others teach us who we want to be and how we want to live our lives.
What relationship has had the biggest impact on you?
