Books

I don't think it's a secret how much of a sucker I am for romantic novels. But whilst before, books would just about dampen my eyes, these few years I've grown more and more sensitive to them, and I end up feeling more pain than probably the writer intended.

It seems they can't be together. You know at the back of your mind that the ending will be happy, that eventually they will get together, but your heart bleeds over the wasted time. I feel like someone has taken a knife and is stabbing repeatedly, again and again at my heart. The pain is so overwhelming, your tears feel choked between a thousand tresses of anguish, their bitterness burning and you're left feeling defenceless in front of the strength of your emotions.

You read over four hundred pages of disappointments, pain, unrequited love, misunderstandings, and only in the very final pages of the book does the hero and heroine get together. Why do books end when they get together? Why can't they get together at the start of the book? Why is marriage always the ending, never the beginning? I'd like to read a book where they get together at the start, where the happy ending isn't the getting together, where marriage isn't seen as the end but as the beginning of the love, where the pain of their separation is only in the first few pages, and the remaining four hundred are coloured with love.

At the back of the book, there was an icon identifying the genre of the book. It works by splitting a pie chart into the genres, and unsurprisingly, the largest segment was allegedly humour, and the smallest pie slice was funnily enough a tear drop.

And still, I spent two hours crying nonstop whilst reading yesterday.