I fell in love with adult romance novels when I was 10 years old.
And not just the teeny-bopper, beta boy romances we have today. I liked the real bodice ripper types—the kind of thrilling, forbidden love story that was the stuff of adult romances.
These days, when the hunger for romance knocks on my door, I let it in either with much enthusiasm—like you would let in an old friend who was once more than a friend—or with a grimace and a groan, thinking, “Why are you even back?” Sometimes, it feels like the date you need on Saturday nights alone. Sometimes, it feels like the rebound date I really want to forget but who keeps calling me.
I was particularly fond of Judith McNaught’s contemporary romances, starring brooding CEOs. (My favorite was Remember When.) I also liked Nora Roberts’ magic romances starring—what else—more broody, alpha males, who somehow had superpowers, more rippling abs and muscles, and maybe even guns and swords. (Though she did write about a nerdy male protagonist once in Heaven and Earth. I liked that book.)
I would hide these books under Sweet Valley High, yellow hardbound Nancy Drew books, and of course, Harry Potter. Because what kid from the 90s didn’t grow up with Harry Potter? Our school library had very limited titles. To please the librarian—because I really liked her and she reserved copies of the books I liked for me—I would borrow the “approved” books: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Tom Sawyer. Of course, at that age, I couldn’t relate to a word in those books. No wonder the last time anyone borrowed those books was in 1986.
There was this one time in the middle of a physical education class in high school. Our kindly, upbeat teacher saw a well-worn-out library copy of Sweet Valley High inside my bag. I had borrowed that one during recess while my classmates played outside. I can still hear her shrill, mocking scoffing up to this day... and still feel the relief I felt that she didn’t see the adult romances I brought to school, which I hid in shame under the approved books. Had they seen those forbidden books, my teachers and classmates would never have let. That. Go.
Why was I so ashamed of loving adult romance novels? And why am I not ashamed now?
But even now, the sigh of relief I breathe thinking that I’ve moved on to adult sci-fi and fantasy makes me wonder why I feel this way. Especially when I make romance novels—among other books—for a living.
Which begs the question: Why was I so ashamed of loving adult romance novels? And why am I not ashamed now?
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I’m painfully aware that I’m well on my way to becoming the tita who keeps asking the younglings when they plan to get married and have children. (“Your eggs aren’t getting any younger, hija.”) God forbid I become the stereotypical crazy cat lady watching soaps till the wee hours of my wide-open Saturday date nights.
One Saturday night alone (minus cats), I finally found the time to watch Bridgerton on Netflix. It’s a show I can watch while doing a hundred other different things, and which doesn’t require too much brain power from me. Hey, get off my back: I’m a lazy, tired, aging millennial. I promised myself to watch one episode a week to de-stress. One a week. That’s it. Then back to personal writing, or my mountainous TBR pile.
Nobody was violently pulling on the arms of a woman and forcing their lips on her. Nobody was coercing anybody into marrying them. Nobody’s clothes were being ripped off their bodies. Nobody gets slammed on a wall to be ravished.
And as I watched, I thought: What was this magical show that was a pleasant yet unsettling alteration of the adult romances I knew from growing up?
Nobody was violently pulling on the arms of a woman and forcing their lips on her. Nobody was coercing anybody into marrying them. Nobody’s clothes were being ripped off their bodies. Nobody gets slammed on a wall to be ravished. (Seriously, how did 10-year-old-me get my grubby hands on these books?)
And people of color were everywhere.
And that scene was… wrong, right? I didn’t just imagine it? She did that without his consent? And it had real in-story consequences?
Consent. Colored protagonists. Self-awareness—and acceptance and subversion—of social and gender expectations.
How… oddly… refreshing.
I read somewhere that Bridgerton is a fantasy romance, a fanfiction of the Regency era made for our era. You know, just like Hamilton, where the cast is colored and only King George is white.
It was an unashamed romantic tale that seems lifted straight from the kinds of books I used to read as a child… except that people of color were finally—finally—getting their due. They get to be seen as they are in a society that has long worshipped white skin. Hang on. Worship of white skin. Sounds familiar.
What about here, where everyone is a person of color? Almost all of us are some shade of brown, for god’s sake.
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So I edit romance novels for a living. I like to think of it as kismet.
I get a thrill when I encounter a manuscript that I know would sweep me off my feet. My palms get sweaty. My fingers shake as I turn pages. My heart races.
I’ve been doing it for seven years. And I think I’ve developed a spider sense of sorts that can detect manuscripts that I’ll like. Either that, or I’ve been really lucky with manuscripts so far. I get a thrill when I encounter a manuscript that I know would sweep me off my feet. My palms get sweaty. My fingers shake as I turn pages. My heart races. You just know that a manuscript is good, and you ravish the pages, impatient for the sweet release of the climax and ending.
That’s how I felt about The Conspirations Of The Universe, When The Rain Starts Falling, Glass Sneakers, Black Equation, Reapers, Hollywood’s Princess, and Six Degrees Of Serendipity… among almost a hundred books—I well and truly have lost count—in all my years as an editor.
Now, I’m not saying I discovered them. Nor will I ever claim to have had any hand in their success. After all, some of them were already celebrities in their own right before we signed them. I’m just saying I had a good feeling about them when I first read the initial manuscripts.
When we first found The Wallflower’s Revenge—the first of The Cosmopolitan Brides (originally named The Jealous Husbands Club) series—by sweetblunch, I had a really good feeling about it. I couldn’t wait to get my grubby, grimy hands on the first book. It was a hunger for something I didn’t think I’d want so much, the excitement of finding something special in the slush pile of manuscripts. It was like desperately digging for gold in an empty mine—and then finding, instead, a diamond.
In The Cosmopolitan Brides, I recognized the beats, the tropes and archetypes, the story bones, the meat of the stories that I fell in love with in the adult romances I used to read. It was Western romance, written by a Filipino writer—Filipino bones dressed up in a Western skin.
We remake them in our own image, our own idiosyncrasies, our own standards of what love should be like.
In this way, it felt different.
As I read more, I realized that we Filipinos make our versions of these Western romances. We remake them in our own image, our own idiosyncrasies, our own standards of what love should be like.
The Cosmopolitan Brides women are white modern princesses with very Filipino values of femininity and prudence. The quintessential Maria Clara but tweaked to want the things they can’t want—and it’s not always the leading man. The men are alpha males who violently pull women’s arms to stop them from walking out on them. Someone is coerced into marrying someone else. There is a copious amount of clothes ripping.
But in an era that has something like, say, Bridgerton, is a book series like The Cosmopolitan Brides something that feels slightly backwards? If the values that power Bridgerton belong firmly to the 2010s, does that mean that sweetblunch’s tales—starring wealthy Mediterranean women and pompous Mediterranean men who, I presume, all have flawless ivory skin—feel like something that belongs to the 2000s… or even the ‘90s or ‘80s?
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It was only recently that I understood why the title of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is Pride and Prejudice.
Elizabeth Bennet is quick to make judgments about other people, especially men like Fitzwilliam Darcy, and her pride makes it difficult for her to get over her prejudices. Mr. Darcy is a proud, wealthy man—top of the social food chain, for sure—who thinks that no woman would ever be good enough for him. Especially not Elizabeth, who belongs to a lower social station. Only when they get over their pride and their prejudices against each other did they finally end up together. Get it? He’s pride. She’s prejudice.
Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, and Charlotte Bronte were considered ahead of their time, writing about Regency-era romances of women, no matter their stations or standing, finding and wanting love in an era where a woman’s worth is attached to the men in their lives. The genre adjusted as the roles of women in society changed and as women became more active participants in their own romantic and sexual lives. It was once taboo to write about sex; now we see sex every few pages of books that look like they’re for 10-year-olds.
Same tropes. Same archetypes. Same story structures. But different meat on those bones. Romance novels reflect the way their eras thought about and treated social issues related to love, sex, and romance.
So what does the Filipino society say about our romances?
Here’s how most of our soap operas and our romances—a body of work that’s Filipino through and through—work. Either the girl or boy is poor, and they catch the eye of their rich counterpart. They can’t be together because he/she is too poor, and mommy or daddy won’t have their precious baby marrying some nobody from nowhere. Queue series of disjointed scenes, narratives, and storylines that constantly break them up, all leading to an almost convenient happy ending.
Oh look, it works out for them in the end. Good for them!
It’s not that these storylines are bad. When they work, they work. marcojose’s Tell Me Where It Hurts and fedejik’s Captivated By Tyrone Greene come to mind—both good, satisfying romances. It’s just that I’ve read enough manuscripts in my career to know that I won’t be racing to find out what happens at the end. It’s not them. It’s me.
I’ve also seen romance novels with a story structure that feels very Western—in the archetypes, the tropes, the three-act structure—but with characters and settings that are completely Filipino. Stories like Hollywood’s Princess and Glass Sneakers feel so much like a Western YA romance, and they actually are! Only the characters feel familiar to us because on some fundamental level, we know they’re Filipino; they’re reflections of who we are as Filipinos.
(I see more of these types of stories from other publishers, too, but I won’t mention those titles here because I like my current job too much.)
It’s also worth mentioning here that we see a rise in LGBTQ+ romances and POC romances, too. Could this also be an indication that we want them to be acceptable to our Filipino society? Because they should be.
The Cosmopolitan Brides, however, is different because it doesn’t play on the tropes and structures that we’re used to seeing in Filipino romances. Both characters are always wealthy, for starters. They’re equals. The books also seem to have been written in an era where women wanting sex is socially unacceptable, and so forced marriages and fake relationships become a way for the reader to peer into their lives and realize that, yes, sex is something that is okay to want. They see strong, independent women who can’t get what they want—basically all the women in The Cosmopolitan Brides books—and who give in to the seductions of a man in romances because they actually want that love and seduction and sex.
They don’t have to be in a position of weakness to be allowed to have those things—like Jane Eyre was before she found out she had a super rich (and super dead) uncle. The women of Cosmopolitan Brides just take it.
If the romances we read reflect on what we want to become acceptable to us and our society, it’s a lot to unpack to see that our desires, as readers, have to be coded into these forced marriages or deceptive relationships. This last part says much about how we view gender roles in our country.
But I think the real question, at least here, is what our romances also have to say about us. What we hope is acceptable for us in romance, love, and sex. Especially sex.
Are we still stuck in a perpetual era of the Maria Clara, of women—people—denying themselves of the things they want because society says they can’t have it? Of us needing to be as white as Europeans to be deserving of love? So we’re forced to find it elsewhere? Someplace safe from judgment?
The Maria Clara we know is different from Maria Clara in the books anyway—she was way ahead of her time, even if her name has been reduced to a shorthand for straight-laced conservatism.
I think we still are, but we’re taking baby steps out of that woman’s gigantic shadow. The Maria Clara we know is different from Maria Clara in the books anyway—she was way ahead of her time, even if her name has been reduced to a shorthand for straight-laced conservatism.
I think that’s why I like The Cosmopolitan Brides books, even if they seem to be half a step behind Netflix’s Bridgerton. In the Philippines, these may be lagging baby steps, but they’re lagging baby steps forward.
I can’t wait for Filipino romance authors to create our own Bridgerton. I think sweetblunch is on her way there if A Sicilian Marriage, my favorite of the entire series, is any indication of that.
Now, after two thousand plus words of rambling, I go back to my first two questions: Why was I so ashamed of loving adult romance novels? And why am I not ashamed now?
The simple answer is: I don’t know. It’s complicated.
I think I was ashamed because I was discovering my sexuality for the first time in a place where I’m expected to be a Maria Clara.
I think I was ashamed because I was discovering my sexuality for the first time in a place where I’m expected to be a Maria Clara. I was discovering female agency for the first time—something I couldn’t get from Harry Potter, Nancy Drew, or Sweet Valley High (though SVH was toeing the line). I was discovering for the first time that I was a woman. That I was a person who wants to love and wants to be loved. That I wanted to be someone who eventually finds out for herself that dating is hard. That I wanted to maybe become the person who dates on Saturday nights and sneaks out on Sunday mornings if the person isn’t my type.. or if I’m lucky, find that the one I go home with on Saturday night could be the one I’d still love in the morning.
But I was not allowed to articulate that desire because of our still very deeply-instilled beliefs on gender roles.
I think I was ashamed because I didn’t understand it—and the adults are too ashamed to explain it to me, and local TV soaps and crime dramas romanticize a negative image of sex. So I went looking for answers elsewhere.
Maybe I’m not ashamed now because I grew up. A little. Or maybe the brand-spanking shiny new idea of feminism of this era has swept me off my feet. (I’m queer by the way, but that’s a conversation for another day.) Maybe I’m relieved that I moved on to reading SFF because I’ve set my sights to the stars, to the optimism of the past and future, and no longer to what’s underneath my pants or what’s the color of my skin. The desperation for self-discovery is gone, and the time to expand horizons is now.
Or maybe I’ve learned that it’s really not anybody’s business what I do with my love and sex lives. Or who I date on Saturday nights. Or whose apartment I sneak out of on Sunday mornings.
In any case, Bridgerton, The Cosmopolitan Brides series, the adult romances I fell in love with growing up, and the many more romances I’ll meet in the future will always be the dates I would want to spend my Saturday date nights alone with—with or without cats. I swear to god, I’d call them back the next day.
And I know I’d still love them in the morning.
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This article originally appeared on PopFictionBooks.com. Minor edits have been made by the Cosmo.ph editors.