It happened just like it always does. One moment, the cashier at Barnes and Noble was complimenting me on my purchases.

The next, he was frozen mid-scan, staring at the book in his hands.

He gave me a thoroughly disgusted look, his well of compliments run dry.

He held up my copy of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s latest, Night Pleasures, by its corner, looking at it as if it were going to start spitting blood and gore all over his Dave Matthews T-shirt.

Since I began to read romance, I’ve endured many situations like these, and so have the 41.2 million other romance readers in America.

Even now in the age of Internet pornography and Christina Aguilera videos, purchasing a romantic novel means that you might as well wear a scarlet letter “D” (for desperate).

How odd that a genre responsible for 1.52 billion dollars in revenue has such a stigma attached to it.

According to the Web site of the Romance Writers of America (www.rwanational.com), in 2001, romantic novels comprised 54.5 percent of paperback fiction sold in the U.S., and comprised 35.8 percent of all popular fiction sold.

Yet despite its success, the idea of sex and romance has one of the largest, longest lasting stigmas in the American culture. It’s evident in every bookstore in the nation, no matter where you go.

You’d expect that a genre selling more than half of all paperbacks in the U.S. to have a large, or at least comprehensive, section at bookstores, but in reality the section devoted to romance is pitifully small.

Any romance reader worth her salt can tell you: size does matter.

The women who buy romance are generally thought, as Mary McKay, chairwoman of the English department, puts it, “to not live in the real world.”

The general opinion of people who see a woman buying a romantic novel is that she has a warped opinion of love and relationships.

Her viewpoint is so twisted that she can’t distinguish between love and lust, or between good literature and escapist novels.

How insulting is that?

Are people who read Stephen King novels immediately labeled as psychopaths who delight in blood and gore? Of course not.

This semester, McKay asked her Texts and Theory class to compare two novels, The Hand of Ethelberta by Thomas Hardy and Mistress by Amanda Quick.

She did this to help prove the validity of romance by showing how Mistress, like Ethelberta, is a parody of popular fiction.

True love, passion and happiness have been the focus of songs, poems and stories since the written word was invented.

What does it say about our society that romance is seen as something to be scorned as we rush to buy the latest slash and kill novel by Robert Ludlum?

Terrible things are all around us: terrorist attacks, starving children, Jerry Falwell.

People read romance to smile, to laugh, to dream. We don’t read romance to deceive and frustrate ourselves.

It seems that too few people understand the benefit of a good daydreamWill things ever change? It’s hard to tell.

I can only hope that we romance readers, like our heroes and heroines, have a happy ending.

Meredith Griffin is a history and communications sophomore.