From Comfort Reads to Cultural Alchemy — Reimagining the Worlds We Long to Create

*Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs (1864) - Frederic William Burton (1816-1900).*

Unless one is living under a cosy rock, there’s a growing sense that the world as we know it is molting right in front of us. If 2020 was a rude awakening to how quickly what we thought was normal could be brushed aside, 2025 feels like a battering ram to our psyches. As the collective plot twists of our world catapult us through the gaping threshold between what was and what is yet to come, we lose our emotional anchor. Unpredictability jars our nervous system, leaving us in a constant state of hypervigilance.

That’s not taking into account our personal transition through this collective maelstrom. In the past couple of years, and for many since 2020, I’ve noticed how many shifts and sudden changes folks are handling. Death in its many permutations (i.e., divorce, death of a loved one, loss of jobs, geographical moves, etc.) is in every story I hear in my social circles. In my group of friends, four of us have had a parent die within the year. Endings usher grief, a landscape we’re poorly equipped to journey through due to our culture’s inability to give us the space for it.

Eight years ago, when I first journeyed through the landscape of grief after my father died, my first loss of a parent, I found solace through myth and in writing. I wrote the beginnings of a novel as a way to reimagine and make sense of my grief. Writing that story, although I never finished, served as a guiding thread through the labyrinth of sorrow.

Nevertheless, grief is never repetitive. It’s creative in its manifestation, even within the same person. I expected my grief over my mother’s death last year to feel similar to how I felt about my father’s passing, but that isn’t so. I had very different relationships with them, and I’m also not the same person I was eight years ago. This time, my journey through the landscape of grief feels less sorrowful, but more filled with feeling adrift, as if parts of my sense of identity died along with my mother. It’s like a massive room in my psyche has been cleared out, and I don’t have the new ‘furniture’ for it yet. This feels at times exciting for its potential, but also discomforting. And all the things that used to soothe me and serve as emotional anchors have felt lacking. Until I started reading romance novels.

*Theseus and the Minotaur, aka The Labyrinth (detail from The Cretan Legend in Four Compositions), Maestro di Tavarnelle, ca. 1500-1525*

While in the labyrinth of transition, let Fluff be your lifeline

Liminal times of transition and change are accompanied by heightened stress, where our nervous systems call for soothing regulation and emotional anchors. What once nourished us will not work, and we need to make shifts to our care. Rest, slowing down, and emptying out serve us as ‘soothing mental massages’ that help us reweave our emotional selves. We also need something that stimulates our imagination to help soften the edges of our stress. It’s less about indulgence, but more about seeing pleasure (i.e., small joys, tender pleasures) as a much-needed signal to our bodies and minds that it’s safe to rest.

When life changes strip away our certainties, what we consider ‘fluff’ can serve as our lifeline between what was and what is yet to come.

*The Swing, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1767)*

But what is Fluff?

It’s an individual experience. What is Fluff to me might not be for you. However, what I’ve noticed is that Fluff is often considered inconsequential, irrelevant, and unworthy of being taken seriously. It’s usually linked to ‘guilty pleasures’ and seen as instruments of escapism. Fluff is mainly regarded as lacking in substance and made for fast and forgettable consumption.

Currently, my relationship with Fluff has served as both a shelter and a compass, reminding me of life’s joys and pleasures. When I relate to it from a place of curiosity, it isn’t hollow; instead, it helps me see different aspects of myself. It also serves me as a lifeline, threading me back to aspects of myself that want to find expression in this new phase of life that I’m gestating.

It’s also offering me a safe harbor, so that I don’t fall prey to dystopian and nihilistic predictions that currently flood our collective imaginations.

*Theseus and Ariadne - Angelica Kauffmann (Swiss, 1741 – 1807)*

Romance as Ariadne’s Red Thread

In the myth of the Minotaur, his half-sister Ariadne gives Theseus, the Athenian hero, a ball of thread to help him find his way back from the labyrinth. I’ve always found this image potent, symbolizing a simple solution to help us navigate a complex problem or stage in life. The thread provides guidance, a way to trace our steps, and ultimately make it through a challenging situation or navigate the depths of uncharted territories in our unconscious.

For me, Romance is my red thread, guiding me through grief’s liminal labyrinth. But it’s also helping find an emotional anchor, while also guiding me towards reacquainting myself with my relationship to desire and vitality. It ignites my libido and even lust for life. The stories rekindle my relationship and appetite for life’s possibilities.

The red thread of Romance shows me how both Eros and the Muses, as in the erotic and the creative, are beckoning me to rekindle old, unlived dreams, while opening up to new possibilities.

Perhaps like many heroines/heroes in both romances and fairy tales, the death of a parent allows one to be finally crowned fully in their creative sovereignty.

The King/Queen is dead.
Long live the King/Queen.

*Pygmalion and Galatea, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1890)*

Romance as Worldmaking

“I’m of the persuasion that imagining dystopias makes them possible, while imagining feral survival, equally opens the door to better futures. … Put beauty and magic and love in your stories because you hope your readers will then more readily imagine and create that reality.”
Sophie Strand: Meet Draco, the New Mr. Darcy

While Romance as a genre is having a moment in the current zeitgeist, it still doesn’t have the respect it deserves. As a genre that contrasts with the voracity of the dystopian narratives that dominate our culture, Romance invites us to imagine a world of beauty, love, desire, and female-centered pleasure. If Romance is Fluff to the ‘more serious’ other, more respected and serious literary genres, then I would rather see it as a form of ‘Radical Optimism’.

Perhaps by choosing stories that center on tenderness and sensuality, while cynicism is our cultural default, romantic Fluff is an act of rebellion. Choosing pleasure, love, and beauty is not a retreat into escapist fantasies, but a reclamation of desire for a life worth living.

For several years, there’s been a rise in the idea that we need to be change-makers and thought-leaders. But what about also seeing the Lover archetype as a cultural healing force?

To the ancients, Aphrodite/Venus was not just the goddess of desire, but also a joy-bringer. Her blessings made life worth living; without them, any achievement would taste like hot sand in our mouths.

Weaving the personal with the collective

In the story I was writing after my father died, I envisioned Death, Grief, and Joy as sisters. One could only reach Lady Joy by also meeting Lady Grief; they were two sides of the same coin, with Lady Death being the initiator. In this current iteration of my grief journey, I feel guided by Lady Joy through the red thread of romance novels.

We’re all nodes in the fabric of this world, and as such, the interplay of our individual healing ripples out into the collective imagination. As such, our relationship to Fluff, our romance reading habits, can ripple outwards and help us imagine more joyful futures together.

I invite you to see the romance novel not as a private indulgence, an escapist fluff, but a rehearsal space for the kind of world we truly desire, not the one that is being sold to us.

Exploring stories centered in love, friendship, tenderness, and community can help rewire us in what we’re willing to accept, while also shaping us to relate to others, intimately and collectively, with more relational curiosity. It can help us break down the myth that cynicism is the only way through, but instead nourish our inner soil so that joy, reciprocity, and beauty can take root.

Fluff - romantic or otherwise - is not an escape from reality, but a red thread linking our private healing with the collective imagination. Fluff isn’t lightweight; it’s light-bearing. It does the deep work of reorienting our nervous system towards joy, while acting as protection against our culture’s addiction to fear and scarcity.

I invite you to see Romance stories as holding space for us while we stand at the threshold between what was and what will be. They serve as a thread guiding us across liminal times by helping us envision a more alive and connected future.

I invite you to notice what ‘fluff’ beckons you now. Can you see them as portals for possibilities, not merely as guilty pleasures?

May the Fluff be with you.
Vanessa Couto

Romancing the Threshold