Romance

PAULA'S NOT SOLD on the college dating scene. Because of her workload as a Temple University biochemistry student, she's more likely to be found cracking open books in her dorm than beers at a frat party. Besides, she thinks that guys her age are, like, so immature. "I've always been attracted to older men," she said. "They've been through more and know how to treat women better. " Paula (not her real name) has a new strategy for finding potential mates, one that can also help pay her tuition.

I really need to keep up with my recommended dosages. Still haven't gotten my flu shot for the virus that is ravaging the country. And I never drank the Kool-Aid that has made every TV critic in America fall madly, deeply in love with HBO's Girls . Time's James Poniewozik hailed the series as "raw, audacious, nuanced and richly, often excruciatingly funny. " As I read one accolade after another about Girls , I honestly found myself wondering whether we were watching the same show.

EDWARD MAY have gotten the girl, but it's Jacob who is the shape-shifting spirit of the "Twilight" movie franchise. A third of the audience views the movies as a wildly satisfying romance, a third views them as hilarious comedy, and another third is somehow content to see the movies jump back and forth between these opposing forms. Everybody seems deliriously happy. To sit at a screening is to hear sighs and snickers occurring almost at once - something the filmmakers appear to understand, and to play without shame or adherence to rules of tone or internal logic.

The posters for "Blue Valentine" describe the movie as "a love story," and in case you haven't heard, that's a very bitter irony. The love story depicted in the widely lauded "Blue Valentine" is the kind that often ends up on "Dateline," with one spouse missing and the other being interviewed in an orange jumpsuit. Which is to say, fraught. With anger, recrimination and a bitter reconsideration of love itself - it isn't an illusion, it certainly has a very short shelf-life, while the misery it leaves behind lasts forever.

In 1931 Jacob Jankowski isthisclose to getting his veterinary degree at Cornell when, like lightning, grief strikes. To escape his woes, he runs away . . . to join the circus. More precisely, he hops a freight carrying roustabouts from The Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. No sooner does Jacob take a job shoveling muck out of the lion cages than this lad with animal skills and animal magnetism is named circus veterinarian. Jacob (Robert Pattinson) is quite taken with Marlena (Reese Witherspoon)

Linda Cajio had just abandoned a half-finished romance novel in her basement in Edgewater Park when Constance O'Day Flannery, a fellow member of the New Jersey Romance Writers group, called. Cajio said she didn't think her discarded manuscript measured up to the romance novels she had become hooked on over the years, but after Flannery heard part of it over the phone, she told Cajio that she was amused and impressed. That was five years ago. Last year, the manuscript Cajio had intended to let molder in her basement topped Waldenbooks' best-seller list for series romance under the title All Is Fair.

Beth Ciotta writes romance novels, but she doesn't spend her Saturday nights eating ice cream. She is happily married, and her house isn't full of cats. And while she loves what she does, she thinks the stereotypes about romance writers and readers are bunk. "I tell people I write romantic fiction," says Ciotta, 48. "Because once you say romance novel, people think of all those cliches attached to it. " Romance novels, though written off by many as fluff wrapped in bare-chested Fabio covers, are serious business.

It was a day of romance complete with handsome male models, racy love stories and lush desserts. Just the perfect setting for those who fancy those steamy romance novels with those eyebrow-raising covers. You know, the ones with titles like Passion's Slave and Savage Thunder and eye-catching covers of bare-chested, brawny heroes with scantily clad maidens in their arms. It was the brainstorm of Darlene Atta to transform the Lenni Fire Company hall in Middletown into a romance readers' haven on Saturday.

Louis Jourdan makes goo-goo eyes into the camera. "What is rhhhomance?" he asks in his seductive French accent. "A man and a woman . . . a dream and, most importantly, a dream come true. " Get out your bonbons and handkerchiefs; romance novels have come to home video. One-time sex symbol Jourdan plays host for Romance Theater, a line of videocassettes launched this spring by Prism Entertainment. The company released six 105-minute titles at $11.95 each in March and sold an impressive 100,000 copies.

Serious literary critics - or at least those who take themselves seriously - aren't usually given to taking romance fiction seriously. Romance novelist Jayne Ann Krentz is resigned to that. What bothers her is that critics don't take the readers of romance fiction seriously. "When they insult the books they have no compunction about insulting the readers," she observed in a phone interview recently. "You don't see that in other areas of fiction. " Krentz isn't sure why critics are so hostile to the genre.