Secret Love…Is It Really Possible?

First Appeared on Jamie’s Place as part of the book tour for Blood Knot.

Unrequited love.  Yearning for a secret love is an old and beloved theme in romance novels.  Sometimes it’s tied up with The Big Misunderstanding plot device, where the two main characters are at odds with each other because of miscommunications.  Sometimes it’s simply someone who loves without expectation…occassionally for years.

Victorian novels used to feature unrequited and impossible loves regularly.  One such love I recall from a classic novel is Vanity Fair.  William Dobbin went for eighteen years trailing after Amelia, hopelessly in love with her, before she finally woke up to the fact and married him.

Modern romance novels don’t torture their character nearly that long.

It takes a lot of work to make a secret love sound convincing in a modern novel.  I wrote not one but two of them into Blood Knot, and now I know why authors don’t do them a lot.  They’re bloody difficult to pull off and make ‘em sound real.

In this day and age, when speaking up for yourself, being assertive and pro-active is the fabric of life, secretly loving someone and doing nothing about it is almost flat-out impossible.  But just for a moment, let’s suppose that the unlikely was possible.  Let’s agree that there exists some rare circumstances where you could find yourself in love with someone and chose not to do anything about it (that don’t make you a spineless wimp…but I digress).  And for the sake of this discussion I am not including any situation where the object of love is married or in a relationship.  Love triangles are a different matter altogether.  Here’s where secret love starts to fall apart in modern terms:  How do you keep it secret?

If you’re truly, really in love with that person in the romantic sense, how do you stop yourself from going to pieces around them every time they step into the room?  How do you stop yourself from showing how much you love them with every expression, every look, everything you do?  A person in love almost glows with it.  If the person you love doesn’t notice, then everyone around you is certainly going to see the change in your behaviour and there you go, the secret is out.  These days, the secret is going to last a nano-second before someone tells the person you love.  There are no barriers to people getting together these days.  No Victorian sense of impropriety.  No one is going to say “well done you,” (or better yet “how honourable!”) for holding yourself apart.  They’re going to think you’re flippin’ crazy and shove you into your love’s arms.

So there goes the secret and your unrequited ambitions.

But…suppose for a moment longer that somehow or another you’re the world’s best actor and manage to fool everyone that you’re cool, nothing has changed, and the person you love desparately doesn’t discharge your pulse every time they walk by.  Now you’re managing to hang onto your secret love.  Go, you.

But for how long?

How long could someone possibly hold onto such an explosive package of emotions like love, and not have a coronary or embolism or total nervous breakdown?  How long can you walk around bottling up true romantic love for another person, day after day, before it fundamentally changes your personality in some way, simply because you’re holding all that high emotional content like a pressure cooker inside you?

And if by some miracle you a) hide all that and b) keep it held tight and secure over the long term without ill-effect, the next hurdle you face is:  How do you keep your love alive?

I know, I know…Dobbin loved Amelia for eighteen friggin’ years before she got a clue.  But that was fiction.

When you first fall in love with another person, the intensity of the emotions, both physical and mental, can be off the charts.  How long can a real person hold onto all that intense, deep feeling, if it isn’t returned in any way at all?  If you see the person you secretly love every day, for example, and they’re blind to your true feelings, how can you continue to love them so intensely and not have your feelings of love change when they blythely carry on with their lives day in and day out without so much as a gentle word in your direction?

Something’s gotta give.  Your love must change in nature.  It has to.  If you don’t receive anything back, you would not be able to love at that level of intensity in a continuous vacuum.  You might love them with less intensity, or less need, or your love may mutate to a more familial kind of love that doesn’t need acknowledgement or mutual romantic love in return.

Which makes the sort of long term secret love story lines in romance novels that we all adore even more unrealistic that ever before.  Dammit.

That’s why I had such a hard time with Blood Knot.  I really shot myself in the foot.  I had to sit down and think long and hard about the why’s and wherefore’s and how relationships and personalities would change if two of the main characters secretly loved someone.  Plus, I wanted to set it up so that there would be damn good reasons for those people to be keeping their mouths shut in the first place, and still have a backbone at the end of the book.

By the time I figured all that out, I had a hell of a complex love story on my hands, and the rest of the book had to fit itself in around the mess.  And that’s actually where I first started to get the idea for the name of the book:  Blood Knot hints at the very tangled mess these people—Winter, Sebastian and Nial—made for themselves.

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