[Note from Frolic: We’re so excited to have author Martha Waters guest posting on the site today. She’s sharing her experience writing less than perfect sex in romance. Take it away, Martha!]
In a world where, too often, girls are told that the idea of a healthy, equal relationship that is also sexually fulfilling is nothing but a fantasy, romance novels—with their focus on both an emotional and a physical connection—can feel downright revolutionary. There’s something wonderfully liberating about reading a book in which a heroine finds a deep and lasting love with a man (or woman!) who is also instantly brilliant in bed, and romance readers are familiar with many a wedding night scene in which a virginal heroine is taken to the heights of pleasure by a skilled, experienced hero.
However, as I was writing my latest Regency rom-com, To Love and to Loathe, I found myself coming back to this idea—of a hero who is an immediate success in the sack—and wanting to have a bit of fun with it. After all, as we all know, relationships take work, and oftentimes a bit of honest communication is necessary to get to true fireworks in the bedroom. What were the odds, I asked, that a handsome, charming, wealthy marquess—with the money and power to seduce any woman he wanted—would have ever received honest feedback in bed? This forms the basis of the friends-with-benefits arrangement my hero and heroine come to at the start of my book, but it also got me thinking about other romances that depict sex that, at the outset, isn’t so spectacular—and how, precisely, this connects to the larger issues at play in a romance novel.