I started my romance novel the same way I started most academic papers: with a burning research question and just a bit of rage.
The question was this: why can’t Black women be rescued or wanted in romance?
I was twenty years old in the time of Disney Princess remakes and men are trash rants, a moment when white feminism was insisting that women didn’t need to be saved. My life at that moment was a dreary dichotomy of taking online classes and orders at a chicken restaurant. I would have certainly welcomed being saved from the boredom of making something of myself.
I wasn’t literally looking for a man to show up, though I would have enjoyed the distraction. Besides, the options were no more impressive than the tired thirty-year-old construction workers coming into the restaurant and my invisible peers giving mandatory responses to my weekly posts on Canvas. I was looking for a purpose outside of my job and school, something to look forward to since the mantra of “focus on yourself” had lost its shine. Romance novels had always been a getaway for me, but it was difficult to find one that didn’t make me cringe. I hated fake dating, high school sweethearts, third-act breakups, mushy confessions, and miscommunications. I hated comic-relief best friends, “sexy” talk that just felt forced, the comedy that wasn’t really funny, meet-cutes that were too silly for me to suspend my disbelief, happily ever afters that ended in marriage without any view behind the closed curtain of holy matrimony.
I wanted something realistic but romantic, and I wanted a Black woman at the center of it. I do believe that anyone can relate to a well-written character, and in fact, I think everyone should commit to reading books about characters who look nothing like them. But when it comes to romance, representation is more important to me than in other genres.
Black women are familiar with the statistics of our social undesirability, and we experience it in our personal lives from comments and criticisms about our attitudes, our looks, our hair, and our audacity. It starts at a young age. I remember a Black boy in sixth grade, who I had a crush on, telling me that he didn’t want to marry a Black woman because he didn’t want nappy-headed kids. I remember another saying he wanted a wife whose hair he could run his hands through (it seems much of the revulsion toward us is centered around hair). I remember being told in high school by a white male friend that he would never date a Black woman—no offense. Throughout school, nobody seemed to like me in that way. Everyone has the right to their preferences, of course. It seemed I would simply have to satisfy mine through fantasy, at least until “he” would finally come into my life to prove both me and the world wrong about my being hard to love.
And so I turned to books that would hopefully show a Black woman being loved with her bonnet on, with her dark skin, with her anger, and her opinions, like any other woman in any other fairytale. And I wanted her to be loved fully and wholly, in the way Gomez loved Morticia, the way Nabokov wrote of Vera, even in the silly, foolish way Romeo loved Juliet. Contemporary romances written by Tia Williams, Jasmine Guillory, Elise Bryant, and Talia Hibbert were ideal for this, and I filled my Kindle app with them to read late into the night. Black girls and women are still looking for stories where men want to save them. But it’s not simply the “saving” part, that part that forces Disney to frantically rewrite its classics. It’s the want—the fact that a man would want to fight for a Black woman, protect her, rescue her, that’s so appreciated in this genre. Where reality offers news stories of Black women being attacked and Black men standing by, later on insisting we deserve it for whatever reason, romance gives us the man who puts himself between the assailant and the Black heroine and says: “Don’t touch her.”
For a Black woman in America, unhesitant protection is the highest declaration of love.
A lot of Black women my age fulfilled their adolescent fantasies of male protection on online platforms such as Wattpad, the literary center of my generation’s first expectations of romance. So many stories, tagged with “Black woman” specifically, are written about Black women being chased after, loved, or made the obsession of possessive mafia men, deadly princes, gangsters—men who would kill for them.
It was here that I began writing a romance that would destroy all of the tropes I had read and place a dark-skinned Black woman at the center of a loving man’s heart. It followed a tall, dark executioner serving a kingdom run by a mad monarch. The fact that he is ostracized by the rest of society for his bloody job is irrelevant to him, because he is absolutely in love with his wife, a Black woman who is witty but introverted, loves books, has kinky hair that he loves to touch and dark skin that makes him think of a soft summer night. It is not one-sided—she loves him for his quiet strength and faith in God, his sharky grin, and his gentle compassion for those he executes on the scaffold. I made them married as a cheat. I didn’t feel like writing a “how we met” story because I didn’t have the energy for the cryptic flirting, the time-wasting shyness, the teasing from friends, the pointless dance that I was already tired of. So instead, I made a subquestion to my original research topic. Within the romance genre, marriage is the ultimate declaration of love and commitment, proof that the stupid miscommunications and third-act breakup just made the characters’ wedding vows stronger. Why are there so few romance books about married couples, particularly married Black women? Of course, marriage isn’t perfect. But people can still be in love after they are married, so why doesn’t romance ever focus on love once it is a routine, once it is boring and expected and even hard? When love is not just the answer to “will they, won’t they,” but the question of “how do we get through today?”
To expand: can a Black woman still be loved when she is not a fantasy or the goal, but when life is hard, when she is hard?
And so the executioner and his wife are beyond ever after, seven years deep into a realistic but happy marriage. The conflict is born when the king sentences his queen to death. Once the executioner does his job, the king demands that the executioner divorce his dear wife, so the king can have her as his new queen. The executioner, of course, refuses. He loves his wife more than anything, and it’s not simply a matter of pride, but of fear for what the king will do to her. The king offers them a way out by stating they can consummate their marriage before him and his court, but the executioner will not disrespect his terrified wife in this way. The executioner is tortured to sign the divorce papers, but he fights through the pain and remains stubborn. It’s not until a soldier raises his sword to sweep off the executioner’s head that his wife throws herself between her husband and the blade, begging him to give her up, because she would rather suffer the king’s strange plans for her than watch him die. And so the poor executioner signs the papers and watches his wife be taken away. The rest of the book is about them fighting to get back together, all the while trying to protect each other from the king’s wrath.
The story gained traction within the first month of my publishing it, and now stands at about 5,000 reads. 5,000 isn’t really impressive for Wattpad, but I didn’t even expect 40 people to read it, and so the extra zeroes are celebrated.
Three years later, I look back on it and think about what finally broke me out of my anxiety about publishing on a public platform. I like to think that the story itself tells me about my mindset at the time. Without any arrogance, I’d certainly describe it as a philosophical romance. Throughout the book, there are discussions between the characters about whether suffering is a punishment. Is true love something that happens once you finally “deserve” it, or is it a gift that is given and then taken once you’ve offended the universe in some way? Why do we ask “why” when nonsensically horrible things happen to us, though we hardly ever receive an answer?
There’s a moment in which the king is talking about how death and loneliness are the worst fates a person can face. Perhaps it was a reflection of my twenty-year-old mind, grappling with the solitude of online school and the frightening hopelessness of my romantic and professional prospects. At a time when it seemed the only men who had any interest in me were either homeless or over fifty; writing a man who was age-appropriate, respectful, and protective was a creative exercise in wishful thinking. Since I had transferred colleges during the pandemic, my friends were back in North Carolina. I was at the age where my parents understood less and less that I was not the child or teenager I used to be, although they insisted, and so I felt lonely in a way I never had before. Loneliness, that vacuum that ironically pulls one deeper into oneself despite the desperation for connection, insists that there is no one who can ever understand.
I think I really was hoping that someone, whether by fantasy or divine intervention, would come and save me. Tell me that I was worthy of being loved, being listened to, being wanted. The “Fictional Man,” or the man that is written by a woman, refers to how men, in reality, are so different from what the heterosexual female imagination wants or expects.
The Fictional Man listens. The Fictional Man cares. The Fictional Man is an expert in his woman’s psychology without being obsessive, knows what she likes, and responds to her needs as well as her wants without being told.
There are debates on whether or not the Fictional Man actually exists because the Fictional Man establishes the standard for disappointment. This creates an interesting dilemma for me, as a twenty-three-year-old woman who has never been kissed and knows that a man isn’t the end goal, but still has the desire for one in my life. Since watching videos on decentralizing men and deprioritizing romance in our lives as women, I’ve come to realize that the Fictional Man is more than just the one we write.
The Fictional Man is the idea that men themselves are the answer to loneliness. The Fictional Man is the reward for surviving singleness, who we will bump into one day after we have focused on ourselves enough to attract a surprise meet-cute. The Fictional Man is the one who we can truly be ourselves with, once he finally comes along. The Fictional Man will give us the unconditional, nonjudgmental love we never received as children. The Fictional Man will eliminate the expectations that made us feel inadequate. The Fictional Man will finally love us for who we are, the way we have been looking for our whole lives. For most of my teenage years I had such a Fictional Man in mind who was inspired by my Wattpad library and my own timeline of expectations, a husband who would surely show up once I went to university, because that’s where you were supposed to meet him. I didn’t, of course, and I wouldn’t have anyway, because the Fictional Man does not exist. There is no one who can, or should, have the pressure of being our entire self-esteem. The truth is we come into this world alone, and we will leave it alone, and we will be lonely in between, and the Fictional Man cannot save us, or even himself, from it.
This is the responsibility I put on my poor executioner. If he were to meet me, he might ask why I put him through that torture of loneliness, why I let him love his wife for seven years before I took her away and made him watch, why I made him lose sleep and blood and weight over whether or not he would see her again. Would I tell him that in the very end, he gets her back? Or would I tell him the truth, which is this; You are a Fictional Man in love with a Fictional Black Woman who represents those who endure feelings of inadequacy and loneliness and are told they deserve both. I did this so they could see how much you love her, through witnessing how you fought the odds for her. I did this so we could experience someone defying the cruel lies of our childhoods and see that we could be wanted, loved, cherished, married, and missed. You are a Fictional Man, and your purpose has been fulfilled. You suffered so we could swoon. Your loneliness comes from me. You inherited it because I am the sad, silent god of your universe who created it because I was lonely. Maybe he wouldn’t accept that, but that would be the answer.
The Fictional Man that I wrote in the story and the Fictional Man that lived in my goals for the future were one and the same. Ironically, neither Fictional Man would exist without me. To think about what I was able to make, a story that touched 5,000 readers, made me realize that nothing was more satisfying than the connection made through writing. I had turned to romance to find the validation that I lacked in real life, and during that lonely summer of my twentieth year, I found it in the readers who clung to suspense for the next chapter, who commented disbelief at every twist, who left crying emojis and exclamation marks at each emotional moment. It was a validation of talent, but it was also the validation of a desire for a story we had all been waiting for, and it turned into a self-validation that I still carry with me—that precious fact that I am someone with something to say.
For me, the remedy to loneliness is here, where I can write something and someone else can see themselves in it, and we both realize we weren’t so alone after all.
I used to daydream about a Fictional Man who would read all of my stories before they were published. He would be my eager first reader, and he would write notes in the margins on what he liked about the story and what he loved about me. All of my books would be dedicated to him. If he comes along one day, he would not be written as the next chapter, or the happy ending, but in the acknowledgments, as someone who became a part of my story and supported me through it. Now I am thinking I will dedicate my writing to my true first readers, the Black girls, who just wanted, for a moment, someone who wanted to save them.
To end, a comment from one of my Wattpad readers: This story is like a breath of fresh air.
*Edited by Non-Fiction Editor, Ravynn K. Stringfield, Ph.D.
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