Grumpy sunshine: exactly what it sounds like. One character is all warmth and stoke and refusing to have a bad day. The other one is wrapped up, hiding, a little bitchy, happiest hidden away. They fall into each other's orbit and something sparks between them.

The easy read is that one of them fixes the other, or that the difference is a problem to solve. It's not. What this trope actually knows is that opposites aren't enemies. They make each other. There's a speck of dark tucked inside all that light, and a kernel of light buried way down in the dark, and the whole engine of the relationship is those two specks reaching for each other.

The close-read is Rachel Reid's smart and funny Time to Shine. Landon's the goalie who wants to disappear. Casey's the sunshine guy who, it turns out, sleeps with the light on.

I have read so. Many. Romances. And hidden all of them. Always on a Kindle, face down, no one sees the cover. Or I'll skip the part in the conversation where we all share what we're reading. And while I was embarrassed about all this reading, I was also just so. Very. Interested. Couldn't stop.

So: this is the part of this series where I go into the dark parts of myself (or, keep going, I guess) and try to get at something that's always been simmering under the surface, but maybe I couldn't quite describe.

The first three episodes were about compulsion for these stories, the formula of them as a medicine, and the interpersonal, magical tension of forced proximity.

This fourth episode is about the energy that sits underneath all of them: shame. Shame and desire go hand-in-hand. So if romance is about desire (it is), it's also about shame (it is).

In this episode I sit with that. I read closely from a KJ Charles historical fiction Think of England, I look at my own stuff along the way, and I try to investigate shame instead of apologizing for it.

Episode 3 is basically about the shadowy parts of our psyche and one of the ways romance likes to look at that topic: forcing your good hidden bits to the surface.

Romance is all about shadows—this is essentially the intersection of desire and shame, one of the core parts of these stories—but this episode is kinda around the rupturing of shadow stuff up into our conscious lives.

You're stuck somewhere, you can't get out...and you run out of energy to follow the rules. Stuff comes up. The mask cracks.

Forced proximity is the pressure cooker that brings it up, and romance wants to know what happens when the good stuff comes up, and stays up, and gets witnessed, held relationally.

The close-read is A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas, and the main character Nesta, is a world-class mega-jerk. But it’s also about the people who force her to crack into something better, who support her.

Forced proximity is a story of what happens in relationship. So it’s also about special guy, Cassian, and about her new friends. Because forced proximity is always mutual. It’s not one person cracking open for another, it’s not performative. It’s two people wearing each other down until something real can exist in the space between them.

The magic I keep reading is that we learn, safely, in the stories and have ideas to take into our lives to practice. And it can transform us for the better.

As humans, we need stories. They help us focus on meaningful information in a sea of chaos. Help us learn, heal us, bond us with others. This is neuroscience. Stories also often follow predicatable patterns so we can get the right information out of them. This is also neuroscience.

Romance novels do this, because they're stories. They do this about relationships, emotions, and about forms of desire.

The formula in romance, one of the things critics like to say is, “it’s all the same book over and over”...well, yeah. Exactly. That’s one of the key features. Good job noticing there’s a pattern!

I can find the pattern every time I read one, and my body just lets go. Shoulders drop, jaw unclenches, belly loosens, the whole thing. I can settle into a predictable, general space and then read a unique, individual story and learn, heal, relax, dream.

The confession episode. The “hi, I’m Kristin and I read almost 700 romance novels in three and a half years” episode.

It starts in summer 2022, on accident, but somehow it becomes book a day, sometimes more, for years. Staying up too late. Reading during other obligations. My family noticing, my family commenting, my family not loving it.

But this isn’t just me. Romance is huge. Something is going on culturally, something hungry. The culture trained us to dismiss this as smut, and yet millions of women keep showing up for it. Because they’re all simple-minded pervs? Doubt it.

Romances are about the structure of relational desire itself, which is form of intelligence that often we’re taught to ignore or feel shame about.

Let's see what these stories can teach us.