I have been reading a lot this summer. Most of it is not worth telling you about. It is free on my Kindle for a reason. I suppose you get what you pay for. Quite a bit of it is just your average poorly written love story, and to be honest I am over the story arch these authors are selling giving away.

I am unimpressed with the grand gesture story of a man showing up at a woman’s doorstep because he can’t get her out of his head. Even if it is raining and he drove all night. I am especially unimpressed when his wife is at home with the kids. His kids. I can’t help it. Even when the author paints the wife as some kind of depressive manipulative mess he is chained to, I am still rooting for her. This attitude makes for a disappointing ending to everything I read.

I want to read about the time that he got in the car and despite feelings developing for another women he deleted her from his phone decided to go to GNC and buy the biggest bottle of St. Johns wort they have and a carton of Chubby Hubby at the gas station on the corner. He then comes home with both and this kind of sexy dramatic ultimatum: Honey I love you, but you only get this Ice-cream if you eat it with this herbal supplement that treats depression. I love you too much to watch you suffer, and I will be bringing you one of your favorite treats to bribe you into taking it until you are healthy enough to want the supplement and a therapist, because you are my wife, and I am choosing not to get you out of my head, my heart, my life.

These crazy stories of people seeing each other once, electric shocks of chemistry, making out in public and in closets, I get it, it is fun. But I don’t want all that mistaken for love. I mean, I suppose it is a piece of romantic love but I am tired of this one trope holding the primary spot over our love story telling. I think we are being sold a giant piece of chocolate cake and then wonder as we feast on nothing but chocolate cake why we have a stomach ache and occasionally throw up. I like chocolate cake for breakfast on all family birthdays and sometimes just because. But there is so much more out there. And most of it doesn’t cause diabetes as quickly as 24/7 chocolate cake.

I want to know why we are uninterested in stories of a man choosing to do the vacuuming every single time it is needed because his wife has a muscle disorder. Even though she has never told him she needed it. Or a man who moves back in with his parents so his girlfriend’s daughter can live in a house with a backyard until he is ready to get married. A house he owns and pays the mortgage on he gives to the woman and child he is falling in love with. No strings attached. I want that in a book.

I know that I am speaking from a place of privilege. I come from a loving home and I witnessed loving relationships from not only my parents but both sets of grandparents. I want those kinds of stories to be the ones my daughters take to heart. The ones they hope for (unless God designed y’all to be single then my girls more power to you!)

I just want more. I want to read about people who laugh at each other’s jokes every single day, people who do the dishes even when it isn’t their turn. I want stories of dream vacations paid for by children who were a witness to this love and just think these two people deserve it. Not dream vacations paid for by one person sweeping the other off their feet and they just have a lot of sex on the beach where no one gets any sand in any crevices (not likely).

My dad’s dad still teases my grandmother like they are in the ninth grade. My other grandfather remembered the first corsage he ever put on the wrist of my grandmother and made sure those same flowers were resting on her casket. That is love. That is the kind of love I want for my girls, the kind I am currently working on. That is the kind of love I am interesting in reading about. Where’s the poorly written free kindle e-book about that?