At the heart of every romance novel is a love story: two people meeting and falling in love. But of course, the unfolding of that love is never simple; ‘The course of true love never did run smooth,’ as Lysander put it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The heroines and heroes of romance stories encounter all sorts of obstacles to love, but the most common – and most difficult to overcome – is within, and it’s a fundamental emotion: fear. Fear of giving oneself to another. Fear of trusting another. Fear of letting go. Fear, ultimately, of change – of losing control.

Here’s a glimpse of my heroine Oriel from my book Aphrodite’s Tears wrestling with fear over her reactions to Damian.

The old man nodded slowly. ‘Give the Kyrios and yourself a chance.’

‘Damian frightens me. He’s too extreme … too passionate. The way he reacted to seeing me with Vassilis wasn’t balanced, wasn’t fair.’

‘Love isn’t always fair. I would say it is more like a pleasant potion that whips the emotions into a sort of ekstasi. Sometimes it is an elusive fantasma that leads the feet of men into chill caverns of despair and across burning deserts of unsatisfied desire. In that state, how could a man’s reactions be balanced?’

‘He was hurtful. How could he…how could he think I was …?’

‘Love is not always kind. Hurtful as a double-edged sword, it lacerates, it blinds the eyes. It is sometimes an intolerable emmon, an obsession which gives neither irini, peace, nor chara, joy …’

Oriel sighed. ‘I don’t know if I can bear it. My life was so orderly before, now it’s all topsy-turvy. It really scares me.’

An orderly life is peaceful. Safe. But it can also be suffocating, dull, unfulfilling. Oriel’s fear of her life being ‘topsy-turvy’ is natural. It can be challenged, though.

What Oriel really fears here is chaos. The Oxford English Dictionary defines chaos as ‘disorder and confusion’. This is the modern definition of the term, but it has other connotations: darkness, a void, a lack of form.

According to the Ancient Greeks, Chaos was what existed before our universe was created. It was a place, and it was personified as the first primordial deity. In the first century BC, Ovid wrote of Chaos in his Metamorphoses:

Before the ocean and the earth appeared – before the skies had overspread them all –

the face of Nature in a vast expanse was naught but Chaos uniformly waste.

It was a rude and undeveloped mass, that nothing made except a ponderous weight;

and all discordant elements confused, were there congested in a shapeless heap.

When Oriel feels her life is in chaos, then, she is not only feeling it is out of order; she is feeling this heavy darkness, this ‘shapeless heap’ of Chaos that is inherent in the notion of chaos.

But returning to mythology, we can see that Chaos is not a negative force to be feared. For from Chaos, the Ancient Greeks tell us, came all of creation.

From the void of Chaos came the other primordial deities: Gaia (the Earth), Tartarus (the Underworld), Eros (love), Erebus (darkness) and Nyx (night). Aether (light) and Hemera (day) were born of Erebus and Nyx. Uranus (the sky) and Pontus (the sea) were born of Gaia. (Gaia and Uranus then bore the next generation of gods, the Titans, parents of the Olympian gods.)

‘I don’t know if I can bear it,’ says Oriel. ‘My life was so orderly before, now it’s all topsy-turvy. It really scares me.’

The course of her love depends on her letting go of her fear, of bearing the chaos – of understanding that chaos is not a destructive force, necessarily, but one from which something new and beautiful can be created.

From Chaos came light – and love.