Today’s guest post is Erin Kane Spock. She writes Elizabethan era historical romance, and her romance story is classic! There is definitely no mystery about her relationship advice and what makes relationships work! Congratulations to her and her husband for recently celebrating twenty years!

Find out more about her here: https://courtlyromance.blogspot.com/p/publicity.html

I remember the day that I realized my husband was THE ONE.

I had recently come out of a relationship where my ex-boyfriend was the type of guy who put himself first always. He was once hours late picking me up from work because he was finishing a video game with his friends. These type of behaviors made me sad, but I treated them with a sense of resignation that came from a lack of self-respect.

Brian, my husband, and I started out with a long distance relationship. I lived in San Diego, he lived in Tucson. He was out visiting and asked if he could borrow my car for the day while I was at work. At the end of the work day he was there, on time, with my car. He’d had it detailed, the tires rotated, and the oil changed. He did that because he saw a need and he met it.

That was it for me.

Yes, he’s given me flowers and chocolate and fancy dinners over the years, but it’s the thoughtful, everyday things that really sweep me off my feet. Flowers are romantic and thoughtful, but getting me a fan with an air filter to help with my allergies is love. I am not saying our relationship is an epic romance. We have had, and will still have, the occasional wrench in the gears, but we trust each other to work them out.

We just celebrated our twentieth anniversary this past December and he is the best partner and father, the best man, I could imagine. I honestly don’t deserve him (really, I don’t–he’s a better person than I am).

That brings me to my point about love and happiness – it’s not something we deserve. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote about our unalienable rights, among them the “pursuit of happiness.” Not the right to happiness, but the right to seek it out.

In my novels, Courtly Pleasures and Courtly Scandals, both my heroines have to get to the point in their personal journeys where they realize they are worthy before they can make the decision to go after their own happiness. Set in the late sixteenth century, both my heroines were raised with and believed in the norms of the time. As women, their lives were manipulated by the men in control. Choosing to be happy meant accepting the responsibility for their own decisions and asserting themselves despite the obstacles. Neither of my books involve the perfect man showing up who takes them away from everything and makes them happy. Of course they fall in love (it’s romance!), but that man doesn’t magically fall into their lives and solve all their problems with his penis. In the pursuit of happiness, they choose love.

Love is a verb, not a noun, and is an action. It’s work. That first flutter in your chest or the corresponding sexual response is infatuation. Arousal. It’s immediate. Love can grow from this, but it’s so much (this is all my opinion and I’m not an expert of any kind) more. It’s a mutual agreement, a partnership. It is based in trust. It takes effort to maintain and so many people give it up when it becomes difficult. Infatuation is a chemical response and so easy, but love is emotional. My aunt and uncle had a needlepoint pillow on their couch when I was a teenager that said, “choose your love, *love your choice.” It really had an impact on me.

I think all of my books will have this theme because it’s important to me and something I want women to know—they can be happy if they let themselves. It may take effort, but it’s not impossible. Call it my message.

We read romance as a fantasy. It’s an escape from the day to day. Some people say that it gives the readers unrealistic expectations, but I like to think it shows us what is possible with some effort. The fantasy is the castle in Scotland, or the fabulous gowns. The glamour is a great escape from laundry or picking up the dog poop. But the idea that we are capable of great love and that we can be happy doesn’t have to be a fantasy.

*Note: Loving your choice doesn’t mean staying with a horrible person, or resigning yourself to a bad decision. It does mean not taking your partner for granted or expecting everything to feel like that first blush of infatuation. I’ve heard people say their marriage failed because they fell out of love, and that can happen easily if you are expecting love to be something that just happens. You define what is romantic for yourself. Romance might mean taught abs and a roaring fire during a blizzard in your fantasy, but in reality (to me, at least) romance is my husband getting up with me in the middle of the night to bathe the three year old while I clean puke out of the carpet, or letting me just cry when my publisher gets closed down. It’s my husband not treating my emotions as if they’re irrational because he knows that I feel them and they’re real to me. It’s him making me gluten free pancakes so I can enjoy breakfast with the rest of the family and unclogging the drain in the tub. All these things are an expression of love and he deserves for me to see that. He may not have abs, but then again, neither do I, and he loves me anyway.

Erin Kane Spock writes Elizabethan era historical romance. Find her on her blog at CourtlyRomance.blogspot.com, on Facebook at Facebook.com/Spockromance, and on Twitter at @kanespock. Courtly Pleasures and Courtly Scandals are available at most eBook sellers. Check out her author page on Amazon at https://amzn.to/2pK6mr9.