Tell the truth: Do you wish we could go back? Because lately, it feels like many of us are looking to the past with longing. We pine for yesterday somehow feeling that the past was better—love was purer, books mattered more, and people knew how to treat each other. It is a seductive premise, is it not?
Fiction thrives on this longing. The success of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone universe proves people are desperate to hold onto a vanishing America. These stories do not celebrate conquest; they mourn what is being lost. Romance novels often tap into the same impulse. And perhaps readers love dukes and arranged marriages not because they want to live in the past, but because the past makes sense. Choices were fewer but clearer. In much of romance set in earlier times, characters do not suffer from paralysis by possibility. They choose this life or that life, this lover or none at all.
Modern life does not offer that clarity. Research shows too many choices make people miserable, and we are drowning in them—who to be, whom to love, how to live. The rules that once governed romance, family, and ambition have fractured. For some, that is freedom. For many, it is exhausting. Fiction focused on the times and/or mores of yesteryear offer relief, they promise a world where struggles exist but within a structure.
The past, of course, was not simpler—just smaller. It silenced many voices and security was, for most, hard to come by. Yet nostalgia remains powerful because it offers the illusion of order. It does not ask readers to navigate infinite choices or constantly redefine themselves. It offers a world with rules, one that feels stable. But, let’s be honest, right now stability feels like a balm.
So what do you want from the books you read? Are you looking for an escape from the uncertainty of now, a reassurance that the past was better, or a reminder that moving forward is worth it? The past is not coming back. But in a world where every expectation is in flux, it is worth asking: Do we really want more choices, or do we just want to feel certain about the ones we make?
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