partly

tvrealm has a prompt where you are supposed to claim 10 words and do something off of them. "Meta" was one of the choices, so I'm going with that. This post's prompt: Just Kiss The Girl.

I’m not a shipper. Don’t get me wrong, I love stories that have romance in them, it’s just that too often when fans (and writers) say “romance” or “ship” they really only mean sex. And quite frankly (fictional) sex bores the hell out of me.

What I love about romance the the dance that leads up to it. The relationships that need to be built and tested and worked on in order for something special to be crafted. For that matter, that dance doesn’t have to lead to a romance at all -- friendship and family also have the ties of loyalty and love (and like I’m talking to middle schoolers, I will point out that love does not equal sex).

I find it interesting that in our societal drive to remove the (very real) negative stigmas that are still (occasionally) attached to sex, we have made the act of sex both the ultimate expression of (almost any form) of love and, at the same time, made the act essentially meaningless. You have two people who work together everyday -- especially in high danger/stress situations -- and when they develop a bond, it automatically goes “well, sex is the only way to truly express that love”. And yet, it also goes the other way -- two people’s eyes met across the room they have this attraction and *bam* they have sex, because well, why not, it’s “just sex” after all, it doesn’t mean anything.

To me the bonds between people are more complicated and infinitely more interesting than ever can be contained in a sex scene. Relationships aren’t meant to be one-dimensional, it’s-all-about-sex pairings. More than that, defining them that way, limits the relationship. Even in the most Penthouse-fantasy-style relationship, you’re going to spend a very small portion of your life having sex. And no matter how hot and steamy the sex, it won’t make up for the times when one is outside shoveling snow in -10° and the other is in the warm house because they don’t care enough to help.

The romances in fiction that capture my heart are those that deal with all that messy real-life crap in all it’s messy real-life glory and still manage to carry a strong bond of friendship into the (possible) sex. Castle and Beckett. Booth and Bones. Peter and Elizabeth Burke. Shawn and Juliet. What makes those relationships great isn’t the fact that they are “doing it”, but rather that they obviously love and care for each other. The sex? Not required.