the ask@AAR: Who are the best parents in romance? Why?

Peeps–my kids are driving me just a little bit nuts. Two of my adult children are temporarily living with us in our three bedroom condo–and one of them has an extremely energetic dog. And while both are, in general, lovely young men, it’s abundantly clear to me that parents in their 60s should not share living quarters with their 20 something children. I confess I’ve found myself occasionally dreaming about all those Regency heroes who were forced out of their homes by stern fathers for… reasons. […]

By |2021-07-29T10:33:28-04:00July 23rd, 2021|Categories: Relationships, the ask @AAR, Wendy AAR|Tags: , |22 Comments
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Thank You, My Friend

eric and time got marriedI was born in 1961. I grew up in a time and place where sex, drugs, and rock and roll were things all the cool kids did. So was psychoanalysis. When I was in junior high, the adults in my town were divorcing, doing est, and using an alarming amount of slang. My church youth group performed Jesus Christ Superstar . We were the “hey, it’s cool” generation; our parents listened to Simon and Garfunkel, and kept their copies of The Joy of Sex on a high shelf.

And yet, despite all this open mindedness (or what I thought was open mindedness) no one I knew well was gay. In high school, I didn’t think much about it and in college, when I did wonder, I didn’t feel comfortable asking and no one was telling.

Then, in 1985, after a rather aimless year spent trying to figure out who I […]

By |2017-06-23T08:30:19-04:00July 1st, 2015|Categories: Dabney AAR, Relationships|9 Comments
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Romance in Real Life: Personality and Love

MyersBriggsTpesSo I’m still not reading much (though I did manage a re-read of my favorite romance novel of all time, Mary Balogh’s Slightly Dangerous). I have, though, been paying a lot of attention to real life romance because that’s where I am at right now.

Believe it or not, I spend a decent amount of time bonding with my ex over how much better we work together as friends and how much happier we are with other people. And this despite the fact that he’s back to dealing with young children again (our youngest child is fifteen) and I am dealing with a significant other who is often away. Both of us have done a lot of thinking and analyzing of why we didn’t work as well together as we wanted to. Part of it, definitely, is that we married so young. I’m not sure anyone knows exactly what […]

By |2017-06-23T08:30:19-04:00June 22nd, 2015|Categories: AAR Blythe, Book news, Relationships|14 Comments
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“Not tonight, dear. I have a headache.” Or not.

I’ve been thinking about what turns women–OK, me–on. And by turns me on I mean interested in engaging in getting busy with my main squeeze.  I’ve been pondering this for two reasons.

The first is that earlier this week an advisory committee recommended that the FDA approve Sprout Pharmaceuticals’s drug flibanserin to treat low libido in women. (Disclosure: My husband knows the founders of this company.) Unlike Viagra, the go-to drug for male sexual dysfunction, flibanserin doesn’t treat a clear cut physical problem. As Cindy Pearson, the executive director of the National Women’s Health Network, writes this week in the Washington Post:

Viagra addresses a physical problem by easing blood flow in men who desire sex but have difficulty functioning. Flibanserin, on the other hand, addresses arousal in women who lack sexual desire by targeting neurotransmitters in the brain, our most complex organ.

Flibanserin has been rejected twice before by FDA advisory committees. Previously the agency’s studies showed the drug isn’t very effective (only 10-12% […]

By |2017-06-23T08:30:19-04:00June 10th, 2015|Categories: Dabney AAR, Relationships|Tags: , , |9 Comments
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A Few of My Favorite Scenes

There’s been a lot in the media lately about women and desire and what it is, exactly, that flips the female switch from watching “The Bachelor” to wanting to do the bachelor (or the husband or the friend with benefits). Recently, in the New York Times, Sheryl Sandburg (the CEO of Facebook) and co-writer Adam Grant posited that men who do their share of household chores have more sex. They coined the term choreplay which does have a nice ring to it. It’s a myth, though, says a well-known and respected study published in the American Sociological Review. That study showed that “husbands and wives in couples with more traditional housework arrangements report higher sexual frequency” which, in layman’s terms means men who vacuum get laid less.  Other sexual scientists believe that many women have responsive sexual desire–what turns them on is to be desired. One thing almost everyone agrees on […]

By |2017-05-24T17:08:37-04:00March 13th, 2015|Categories: Characters, Dabney AAR, Heroes, Relationships|10 Comments
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Writing a New Love Story


How good are you at reading in between the lines? If you’re better than me, maybe you saw my impending divorce coming before I did. When I blog, I tend to take inspiration from what’s going on in my own reading and in my life. A few months ago I wrote about the romances that mirror your own romance, and in a roundabout way discussed my newfound disenchantment with heroines who marry too young. […]

By |2017-06-23T08:30:24-04:00November 21st, 2014|Categories: AAR Blythe, Relationships, Romance, Romance reading|36 Comments
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Grown-Up Reading: Why Romance and Happy Endings Matter

QRMI heard George RR Martin on the radio the other day. Asked about the Game of Thrones body count he said something like (this is a paraphrase): “I used to read stories that had happy endings, where people did good things and nobody got raped…then I grew up.” Meanwhile, in an article on children’s fiction, author Robert Muchamore observes, “While a childish thirst for happy endings satisfies and entertains us, the real world is so complex that unambiguously happy endings hardly exist.” […]

By |2017-06-23T08:30:25-04:00October 24th, 2014|Categories: Guest Posts, Reading, Relationships, Romance, Romance reading, Romancelandia|Tags: , |25 Comments
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A Formula for Romance… Novels

Math_FormulaCritics of romance novels often cite a long list of problems with the books and one of the most frequently used is that the books are formulaic. Some authors embrace that idea and give a guide to what they think of as “the formula” such as Paula Graves or Rita Clay Estrada and Rita Gallagher. Others like Anne Gracie heartily reject the idea. Harlequin calls it a format and insists that all genres use such a tool. […]

By |2017-06-23T08:30:26-04:00September 8th, 2014|Categories: Maggie AAR, Reading, Relationships, Romance reading|27 Comments
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