Escape with Love

An Escape with Love

        Soledad Reyes’s The Romance Mode in Philippine Popular Literature is by far the only reading I wholeheartedly agree with. Reyes has pointed out how the romance genre became a way of escaping reality while manifesting the real world at the same time. This paradoxical quality of romance, as what Reyes stated, is one of the reasons why the popular literature has been supported by many.

        In the reading, I was quite caught with this quote: “The romance mode is rooted in [such a] notion of escape, it allows the reader to leave the familiar world behind, but only for the moment, because the reader is forced to return to his/her world, hopefully with a new perception of that familiar reality.” It explains perfectly what I think of all literature written specifically for the romance genre; we read them to fall in love, to see the romantic gestures of each characters, and to dwell on the happiness that the characters experience. But only for a moment, and only during that moment. Once we’re done reading and dwelling on the feeling, we throw it aside. Generation Y loves the idea of romance. But when it comes to real life, we deny the possibility of it happening to us. The millennials embrace the thought of love, but their perspective of it happening in real life is skewed.

        The amount of romance novels being released these days shows just how much we embrace and support this fiction. But what I would like to see, (in everyone and even in myself), is a change of perspective when it comes to love. I want to be able to see my generation embrace the idea of love, like how it was embraced during the old times.