The Romantasy Therapist

If Romantasy is good for your mood, we’d love to hear how it’s helping your mental health. Romantasy is supportive to mental health in lots of different ways, from reflecting real life concerns to providing an escape from them.

It seems completely appropriate that Romantasy has arrived just now, when there’s an awful lot of doom and gloom around. As a therapist, I know that right now social anxiety is through the roof. This makes it more difficult for people to mix and maintain relationships, so that loneliness and low confidence are commonplace.

It can be no coincidence that Romantasy really took off alongside Covid, when people were feeling a lot more uncertain, not just because of the pandemic but also because the world just seemed messed up.  Missing friends, work colleagues, other family members and their daily routine during the lockdowns had a negative effect on people’s mental health, with young adults and women particularly affected.

Everyday habits

This was the first time it really became evident how much everyday habits help maintain our mental health. For instance, the regular exchanges we have with our barrista, our favourite lunch, chats with other students or colleagues, and downtime on the way to and from work, turn out to have been helping to keep us feeling mentally fit. Without these minor events, people had to find other rewarding behaviours. Romantasy totally fit the bill.

The exciting stories are an obvious escape, but they also reflect the scary world we’ve been living in. We’re able to feel the fear less directly through Romantasy, and work through tricky feelings more comfortably.  Some characters even have real life problems, like Ophelia in Kaylie Smith’s Phantasma who experiences a harsh and critical Shadow Voice as a result of her OCD. Violet from Fourth Wing lives with a physical illness – potentially Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue condition which causes pain, exhaustion and difficulties with wound healing – all major disadvantages for a dragon rider during a war. Or there’s Freya from Danielle L. Jensen’s A Fate Inked in Blood, who gets out of one  horrible relationship only to swap it for another. And there are plenty of characters whose families treat them appallingly.

Relatable characters

Though this is fantasy, many of these characters are highly relatable. We feel we know them, or they could be us. We have similar feelings and moods, so that reading about them makes us feel less alone and a bit safer, especially as they are usually resilient and positive in even the darkest of times.

Sharing the characters’ process of working through their difficult emotions not only helps us to feel more normal but also provides alternative, and sometimes more helpful, ways of thinking. This can even boost our ability to come up with our own solutions and improve our overall concentration, as well as being entertaining and helping us to relax and reset. And the way many Romantasy writers evolve their stories over a series of books means we have a lot to look forward to, which helps to promote healthy endorphins and positivity.

“We just love it when the utter dick turns out to be the best boyfriend ever“

Then there’s the romance, of course. We just love the hope in the enemies-to-lovers stories, when the utter dick turns out to be the best boyfriend ever. Though we agonise over the near misses in their relationships, we’re absolutely one hundred per cent rooting for them every step of the way, savouring their ups and downs and lapping up their perfect relationship etiquette.

But the books aren’t just an end in themselves. As well as immersing us in terrifically fulfilling and colourful adventures, as well as a fair bit of spice, they open up a huge population of like-minded readers. Just knowing they’re there is a thrill, but the online communities are busy and buzzing, providing great reviews, terrific memes, as well as offering the chance to share our theories and experiences with the books and even meet the authors. Let’s face it, who doesn’t feel like Rebbeca Yarros and Sarah J. Maas are our friends?

Let me know how Romantasy is good for your mental health, and let’s see if we can start another feel-good community that’s totally in love with Romantasy. TRT