
Originally Posted by
BornForBurning
Morgana, hard as this may be to accept, I suspect that the reason you're struggling with this so much is that your heroine is precisely the kind who will find out, perhaps even against her own expectations, that she wants to get married. What does she want? I mean, exactly? Reality: if she's a human, she probably wants love. Not necessarily erotic love, but because eros is arguably the deepest/most vulnerable form of love that two humans are capable of, fiction often revolves around its pursuit (or its avoidance!) The only real way to write a character who isn't pursuing love is to write one who has already found it, or one who is fleeing it. You do not need to have your protagonist pursuing specifically erotic love. But if she is unloved, she will by definition have an unspeakable craving for intimacy that claws at her soul.
By the way, 'friends and wine in your 40s' isn't love.
I think you may have picked a fight you can't win. Humans are programmed to seek intimacy. We crave intimacy. Intimacy requires vulnerability, vulnerability requires us to step outside our own self-expectations. Your protagonist wants to clutch at something, whether it be her husband, her God, or a wine-glass. Btw, what does 'sees as healing to her' even mean? Something is either healing or it isn't. It doesn't matter whether the protagonist 'sees' it as healing one bit. Hey, here's an idea: you mentioned wanting to write this girl as hating her own birthday. Maybe she hates her own birthday because her parents never loved her, and her birthday was a reminder of just how fake the celebrations really were. Eh? Gosh that's so sad though, lol. My birthdays were always great.
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