Abby Jimenez ruined men for me.

Fictional by Khloe Rose blasts through my headphones constantly. It’s my go-to song for whenever I fall in love with a new fictional character. I will never not scream, “I’d rather keep on dreaming of someone I’ll never meet than give love to another who won’t choose me.”

At twenty-four, I have lived a very full life. I have loved and lost and loved again. I’ve moved across the world, lost my mother, fallen in love, lost a once-best friend, gotten married—and that’s just the bare bones of it. Through it all, I have had a book in my hands where someone falls in love with someone else. It doesn’t always work out, but it’s always been an amazing story. I liked the idea that even though life wrings you out and drains the color from your life that you could one day come home, see your person smile, and suddenly see pink again.

Love and romance weren’t things I really grew up around in real life. My parents separated for a multitude of reasons, my family is complicated at best, and I’ve had my roots pulled and pulled and pulled again. Then, I stared out into the stars, closed my eyes and whispered confessions to the wind, hoping that somewhere out there was a man who could hear them.

He was making his way to me as fast as he could.

Say You’ll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez

This reflection has come about through the works of Abby Jimenez, who unintentionally outs my innermost thoughts through her FMCs. If you want to know me, read Abby Jimenez. It’ll rip you apart before putting you back together again, wrapping you in love and agony. You can purchase her most recent novel, Say You’ll Remember Me below. If you want to read her other works (Yours Truly is one of my favorites, along with Just for the Summer), you can take a look at our bookshop!

“I was always waiting. Waiting for him to come back.”

Say You’ll Remember Me follows the parallel lives of Xavier, a Veterinarian I’d Like to F***, and Samantha, a social media manager of a mustard company. The two of them connect when Sam rescues a kitten without a butthole and he advises euthanizing the cat—later named Pooter—if she couldn’t afford the extraordinary care the kitten needed. She calls him an asshole, fundraises the money (which he donated $500 as an apology), and comes back just to show him that he was wrong. It’s the kind of petty I aspire to have in my daily life, and the kind of yearning a girl needs.

They go on a legendary first date, connect, then he drives her to the airport for her move to California. Suddenly, two soulmates are two thousand miles apart, killing themselves to make it work. It choked me with my own yearning before it enveloped me in its  quiet assurances. Everything was going to be okay. What a rarity.

“The need was more than just missing her. It was the absence of my person. The inability to hold her and be held. There was no substitute for this. For the feeling of her arms around me.”

The word hiraeth comes to mind. It describes a deep longing for something, especially one’s home.

I don’t think I ever really had a home.

My childhood house was filled with cracks and fissures. It was a tightrope I balanced on with closed eyes and crossed fingers. I hoped my parents got along. I hoped my brother was safe and happy. I hoped I would one day find love.

Because in my books, love was the most precious treasure on the planet. It was meant to be protected and fought for. It was in the brave desperation of Eleanor and Park, where they knew love wouldn’t last but tried anyway. It was in the fire of Clary’s heart while she wished for the angel to grant her Jace. It was in Annabeth irrationally trusting her gut as she took a knife for a seemingly invincible Percy Jackson.

I didn’t want to read the darkness, though I did. I read George Orwell’s 1984, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, and even Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the my first boyfriend’s car with his family. I chose them for school, so I’d sound smart in papers and dinner conversations and didn’t belong in. I appreciated them, sure, I always appreciated a good story—but my home was in the pages of romance.

Maybe you’ve felt it too. The home in between pages, where the inky hearth provided you more warmth than the dinner table ever did.

“I want someone who knows everything there is to know about me, and I want to know everything about them.”

I hear it all the time: how do you expect someone to read your mind? 

I don’t.

But when someone’s grandfather dies and COVID won’t let them attend the funeral, I think it stands to reason they’d be upset by that. When you tell your girlfriend you’re in love with another woman, I think it’s common sense not to ask if you can invite said woman to her halloween party. When your disabled lover dislocates a joint in bed, I think it’s safe to say the mood has been killed.

These are real stories I have.

From years of dating in New York City, I have accumulated experiences of real men letting me down this way over and over. Yes, I did ask if I was the problem—it’s often the first line of inquiry for my mind. The problem is I’m not the only girl with stories like mine. I’m not the only girl from a broken world, whispering wishes to the wind like it’ll listen.

The ‘classics’ are mostly written by men because women weren’t allowed to write them. They’re concerned with being a hero or finding your own way, and that’s all well and good, but what about a story of how to love?

How do we love? In a world filled with darkness and “set your standards lower,” how do we find the color in the gray?

Most of the women I know know how to be alone. We are no longer of the age that told us to depend on men. We have been taught from youth how to be independent, how to care for, how to nurture. We are the tree that gives. Our story is of men apologizing until we are nothing more than a stump. But what if we rewrote it?

What if Mr. Darcy changed, like Jane Austen wrote, and became better for love? What if Mr. Rochester saw Jane as she was instead of what she should be and loved her anyway, as Charlotte Bronte wrote? What if Xavier risked his entire life as he knew it to make it to his home, Sam?

If romance were really that predictable and easy, it wouldn’t have so many critics or sell as well as it does. Developing your identity sounds pretty predictable and easy too, but nobody’s fighting their place in a bookstore.

“Because if you were my wife you would be my world. Everything starts with you and ends with you. Anything else is just the stuff that happens in the middle.”

Maybe it’s a pipe dream, but I wish we would stop writing romance off as fantastical entertainment. Romance isn’t escapism—it’s a radical act of hope. Writing it off only does one thing: it lowers the bar so people can forgive themselves for not rising to meet it.

I deserved a man who enthusiastically chooses me, even when it’s hard. I deserved a man who could be the steady anchor to my chaos, because that’s what my life has been. I deserved a man who could see the weights I’ve carried my whole life and offer his two hands to help. Because that’s what I’ve given. “If he doesn’t make me feel like life is an Abby Jimenez novel, I don’t want him,” was the catchphrase of my single life.

I’ve always been the girl that bakes cookies, unprompted, just because I know a little bit of sugar goes a long way in making a bad day good. Then, I’ll lie so you don’t have to carry the burden of knowing I did it just for you. And if you understand what I mean, this book belongs on your shelf too.

In defense of romance: it is a dream worth listening to. A fantasy worth working towards. Romance isn’t just entertainment or smut. It isn’t only steamy scenes that make it desirable. It’s the fact that in these stories, people are seen, loved, and chosen over and over. Because loving is easier than breathing; it’s the staying that’s hard.