Maybe you haven’t noticed. People over the age of 40 fall in love. Middle age and beyond does not, despite what you see (or don’t see) portrayed in film and fiction, spell the end to love or sex, or the need for love or sex or fun or adventure. That’s why some of us are writing what we like to call ‘Seasoned Romance’.
Culture creates content, and content creates culture. The books you read, the movies you watch, the advertising you see everywhere matters, it shapes our identities, colours our view of the world. As studies indicate, from childhood we are susceptible to the influence of entertainment’s content, and through the content we consume we have developed inaccurate views about age and ageing that persist throughout our lives. Without noticing, we have become comfortable with a society that subtly stigmatises ageing, treats it as a disease to be fought, and derides human beings—particularly women—for getting older.
In fact, we accept the roles older women are assigned to—you know, granny, harpy, cougar, cat lady, menopausal loon—as accurate, often without realising because, as Naomi MacDougall Jones says about Hollywood’s ageist and sexist presentations, “That’s just the way it is.” I’ll go further to say that if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll only get what you’ve always got. Age is often overlooked as an issue of diversity, but in the discussion about diversity and inclusion, ageism and sexism matter. And it’s time to change what ‘we’ve always got’ with Seasoned Romance.
What’s Seasoned Romance? Easy. A central love story where couples (m/m, f/f, m/f) of ‘a certain age’ are front and centre, and by front and centre I mean as lead characters in a story that comes with all the hallmarks you love and expect in a romance, novel, right down to sexy times and the all-important Happily Ever After. I write Seasoned Romance with an emphasis on the portrayal of women over 40 as romance heroines, and I always have, long before Seasoned Romance had a name. In fact, my latest release At Your Service and upcoming release Forever in Your Service feature a middle-aged female butler and the slightly younger spy who loves her.
If you said ‘ewww’ to the idea of a 50-year-old woman falling in love and getting it on with a 46-year-old ‘silver fox’ spy hero, then have another look at how you think about yourself as you get older. If you’re a woman, do you honestly think that, once you hit 40, you’re all washed up in life, that your better days are behind you, that love and sex dry up because peri-menopause, menopause or incontinence or whatever anti-wrinkle product you’ve been told you need to reclaim youth because youth was so fantastic, and getting older is dead?
Again, the images you see, the books you read shape our identity and older people, and older women are not tokens, comic foils, secondary characters, or stereotypes. Men have had the advantage of being silver foxes, but now, women of a certain age are finally being positioned as protagonists who challenge ageism, rather than as a stereotype or joke. A female audience is beginning to see themselves as intelligent, interesting, confident, powerful, sensual, sexual, whole human beings who just happen to be older.
Isn’t this what we want in our lives, in our romance, to see ourselves represented? Seasoned Romance is going to be huge. If you’re looking to read (or write) Seasoned Romance check out our Facebook group for books & authors! Here's the link:
Seasoned Romance Facebook Group
How you feel about romance fiction with older characters as the leads?
I love to love coffee.
I love to laugh and I laugh a lot—usually at the most inappropriate times.
I love to learn and this is evident by how I wound up with a BA, MA and PhD, the former focused on the overlooked audience of romance readers wanting romance featuring older leads, and the latter on the portrayal of older women as romance heroines.
Teaser: Forever in Your Service: A heartbroken butler. A dead spy. A randy little dog. Can true love survive a game of cowboys & charlatans?
Buy link books2read.com/u/mlenGq
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