Any romance author faces a challenge in his or her writing:

The character’s journey to falling in love, from feeling the first stirrings of attraction to making a lasting commitment, must make logical sense to the reader…

But:

… love, sometimes, defies logic.

Take any enduring love story, one that captures imaginations to the extent that it becomes more than a book and part of the very fabric of a culture: Romeo and Juliet, Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, to name but a few. In each love story, the characters face turmoil and inner conflict: their love is not easy, simple, but a choice to make that involves courage and surmounting obstacles. In each story, we follow the characters’ struggle, and the draw for us is seeing them conquer all and find that happy ending. Along the path, we see the unfolding of the journey, the cognitive process that evolves as the characters work through their issues to that place of peaceful, accepting love. That is a romance story. That is what we love to read.

And yet, within all the reason laid out carefully by the author there lies a little of what Shakespeare called the ‘madness’. For as seventeenth-century French theologian Blaise Pascal so adeptly put it, ‘the heart has its reasons which reason does not know’. Love is not always rational, sensible. Love can be rash, daring, crazy, incorrigible. Romeo and Juliet committed suicide for their love. Jane Eyre ran away from Mr Rochester though she had nowhere to go. Bella and Edward, lamb and lion, fell in love though they were utterly incompatible.

In my latest novel, The Echoes of Love, I was conscious throughout the writing of striking the balance between logic and instinct, reason and that pure, heady love that comes from a place of sublime romance. This was particularly interesting for me as an author because my heroine, Venetia, is usually a cool, level-headed, pragmatic woman. An architect by profession, she is trained to be methodical and exact, and to drill down to the level of minutiae. She is a thinker, an explorer – an intellectual. So when she meets Paolo, and is instantly seized by strong feelings of attraction, she is somewhat derailed from her usual path. How does this attraction fit with logical analysis? How does the sense of destiny  about their blossoming relationship marry up with a way of life that has for so many years been calm, controlled, controllable?

The result is a woman plunged into confusion, doing her best to find the right path through her myriad feelings and thoughts. And by the ending of the book (whose twist I wouldn’t dream of giving away here!) some of the reasons of the heart ‘which reason does not know’ become a little clearer.

Ultimately, though, I believe that in any romance story an element of ‘je ne said quoi’ must remain.  Isn’t that what makes falling in love, being in love, so full of wonder and sensation? In what other part of life do we get the sheer pleasure, the freedom and thrill, of moving away from obeying the head, too often cold and rigid, and surrendering unequivocally to the heart, warm, vivacious, affirming?

What do you think? Do you embrace ‘the heart has its reasons which reason does not know’? Or do you like to trace a clear logic for two people to be together? To what extent does romance mean sacrificing reason? I would love to hear your  thoughts.