Having read the title of this blog post, you may be thinking: Modern and courtship? Now there are two words that don’t belong together. True, courtship conjures up a picture of times gone by, before the Jazz Age heralded a shift to ‘dating’, but it’s valid today to describe the period of time in a couple’s relationship that precedes their engagement, marriage or lasting partnership.

The word caught my eye this week in a fascinating Vulture interview with Outlander author Diana Gabaldon. She discusses the difficulties she’s faced in the genre categorisation of her Outlander series. The first issue is that the books don’t sit neatly in one genre: they are romances, but also historical and fantastical (time travel). The second issue is that the romance scope in Outlander doesn’t match up with the norm in the romance genre; Jamie and Claire’s story extends far beyond the courtship phase.

Diana says: ‘A romance is a courtship story. In the 19th century, the definition of the romance genre was an escape from daily life that included adventure and love and battle. But in the 20th century, that term changed, and now it’s deemed only a love story, specifically a courtship story.’

She further explains: ‘[I]n romance novels, those are courtship stories. Once the couple is married, that’s the end of the story… I’ve never seen anyone deal in a literary way with what it takes to stay married for more than 50 years, and that seemed like a worthy goal. On one level, this series is telling the story of how people stay married for a long time.’

Have you ever noticed this about romances – that they focus on first love, young love, the courtship phase only? I wonder what has created this modern preoccupation with the courtship phase. Is it that we long to remain forever young and in that first flush of love? That as we age we escape by going back in time, rather than sidestepping? That we need to escape our current time? That we only value new love, not love that endures? That the young displace the old, and as women age we disappear, as suggested in this recent article on Lit-Hub: ‘On the invisibility of middle-aged women’?

Writing my Andalucian Nights series really opened my eyes to love stories that continue beyond the courtship phase. Indiscretion, the first book of the series, focuses on Salvador and Alexandra in the early days of their love. In the second book, Masquerade, the next generation is the focus (their daughter, Luz), but Salvador and Alexandra are part of the story too. After many happy years of marriage, they are still beautifully in love. Here’s a peek at them in a scene where Luz receives a letter:

‘There’s nothing like a romantic note to entangle a sensitive woman’s heart,’ Alexandra declared as she gazed lovingly at her husband, clearly remembering the days of their courtship.

Salvador laughed. ‘We Spaniards are masters in the language of love, is that not so, mi amor?’ He picked up Alexandra’s hand and kissed it.

I thoroughly enjoyed writing the Salvador and Alexandra scenes in Masquerade; I could quite happily have written many more. I was very glad to be able to stretch the limits of the modern romance genre to include this ‘older’ love story as well. In many ways, I wish I could write the entire story of Salvador and Alexandra’s love, from start to finish – and the full love stories of Rafe and Coral in Burning Embers and Paolo and Venetia in The Echoes of Love. An author always finds it difficult to leave her characters behind.

What do you think of the current scope of romance stories? Would you like to see more variety in terms of when the story ends? Do you love epic stories like Outlander that span many years? I would love to hear your thoughts.