The Liminal: Crossing the Threshold into Unfamiliar Terrain

Some crossings arrive with a clear event: you left, something ended, the news came. Others arrive quietly, when the life you've been living stops fitting. Either way, you find yourself on unfamiliar ground, where the old ways of getting your bearings don't work.In this solo episode, I talk from the middle of my own crossing about that ground, the liminal: why the identity that got us here is the first thing to go, why letting it go is so hard even when we want to, and why the body and the mind so rarely cross at the same speed. Romance novels have a lot to teach us here, because they guarantee an ending, and life doesn't.If you're standing on that ground yourself, I'm teaching a three-part series on it this December, The Liminal: Crossing the Threshold into Unfamiliar Terrain. You'll find the details, and the door in, at vanessacouto.com/the-liminal. Enrollment closes on December 4, 2026.A show about crossings, and how romance novels teach us to make them.Find the writing at vanessacouto.substack.com and everything else at vanessacouto.com. Get full access to Vanessa Couto at vanessacouto.substack.com/subscribe

Once a season, my husband Jason comes back to the show, and this year he invited himself. Almost two years into my romance reading, we talk about what it has changed in our house, what he'd tell other husbands about romance novels, and why the grand gesture falls flat without an apology. He has thoughts on book boyfriends, Mr. Darcy, and Han Solo. Then the trip: Hastings and the Bayeux Tapestry, Jane Austen's house in Chawton, Chatsworth, and the record stores, which were his. Along the way we name our trope, grumpy sunshine, but not who's who. Cast your vote in the comments on Substack or on Instagram at @vanessacouto.stories.A show about crossings, and how romance novels teach us to make them.Find the writing at vanessacouto.substack.com and everything else at vanessacouto.com. Get full access to Vanessa Couto at vanessacouto.substack.com/subscribe

Fairy tales were not written for children, and most of them are not love stories at all. Kelly Jarvis, who teaches fairy tales and folklore, returns to the show to trace what the romance novel took from the old tales, and what a romance can do that a fairy tale never could.Along the way she reads Beauty and the Beast as a story about money, and draws a line between the wealth that hoards and the wealth that circulates. She explains why Cinderella has been consistently misread. And she walks through a category of tale, thousands of years old, in which the woman is always the one who goes out after what she has lost, which turns out to be the shape of nearly every romance novel on the shelf.Kelly Jarvis is the author of Sea and Stars, a Beauty and the Beast retelling.She also says something at the close about what it means to have a guide at a threshold rather than crossing alone. If that lands for you, there are eight Threshold Lovers waiting, and one of them is already walking with you: https://www.vanessacouto.com/threshold-quizRomancing the Threshold is a podcast about crossings and the stories that carry us across. Get full access to Vanessa Couto at vanessacouto.substack.com/subscribe

Ask a room of romance readers what the books do for them and the first word is escape. Then coping. Then checking out.Stay a little longer and the stories say something else.A woman who learned to say “I can’t today” out loud, after years of hiding what her body was doing, because a character she loved said it first. A couple who stopped falling into the same fight, having watched that fight play out badly in book after book. Women who came back into their own bodies through scenes on a page, stretch marks and all, and then heard the same words from their partners and finally believed them.None of that is leaving. That is going somewhere, and coming back carrying something.The better word might be crossing. A crossing has a shape to it. You leave the shore of the life you know, the one with the laundry and the diagnosis and the job that starts Monday. You go somewhere the rules are different, where desire is safe and the ending is promised and someone sees the whole of you without flinching. You stay as long as you need. Then you come back, because we always come back. And the life is exactly where you left it, because it never pauses for anyone. What has changed is you, slightly, in a way that might take weeks to name. You are carrying something now. A sentence you can finally say to your husband. A permission you didn’t have on the way out.Nicole said the happily ever after does not have to wait for the last page. She looks for one at the end of every day, in what she called lo cotidiano, daily life. A sweet treat. A good hour. One thing that ended well. She said it while mid-move, mid-new job, mid-everything.That is the part the culture misses when it calls these books fluffy, superficial, inconsequential, or at best an escape into fantasy. The ending is not the reward for finishing the book. It is the thing you practice until you can find it in a Tuesday.This is what I reflect on when I read romance. These books do not help us avoid our lives. They help us cross. We come to what is hard with fresh inspiration, in the company of characters we love, and with the curiosity of lovers rather than the braced shoulders of someone waiting to be hit. Then we return with something that does not announce itself. It rarely looks like much from the outside. It is foundational anyway, because it changes how we live and how we relate to the people in front of us.My thanks to Courtney, Nicole and Erica for their willingness to have this conversation, and for showing up on a school night, well past all our bedtimes, tired from everything each of them carries in a day.What have you brought back from a book and put down in your own life?Comment below, send this to the reader who would recognize herself in it, and subscribe if you want the rest of this series.Guest Bios:Courtney, best known as "simply.bookz" in the Bookstagram community, is a stay-at-home mom with an obsession for reading. If the male lead is a monster or alien, Courtney has probably read it. She also enjoys small town, romantasy, and the occasional dark romance. Embracing romance has created a safe space for healing, vulnerability, and passion for Courtney. She is proud of making everyone's TBR piles a little more interesting.Nicole Nava @mrs.nicolenava is a 33 year old professional yapper with a penchant for noisy accessories. You will hear her before you see her. A hopeless romantic and mother, she’s truly a force to be reckoned with.Erica is a lifelong lover of books who’s been turning pages since she first learned to read. She reads across many genres, but her favorites are historical fiction, romance, and most recently, fantasy. She’s happiest with a book in hand, whether curled up at home or chatting about her latest read with her book club.And shout out to Sherwood Bookstore! The place we all met and has been serving as a third space for us and the community. If you are in the area, come and stop by! We do not cross alone. Romance keeps pointing at this. The stories put a figure beside the one who is changing, and once you notice it there, you start noticing it in your own crossings.It does not have to be a person. It can be a presence, a quality, a way of meeting what is coming. Something that holds steady while everything else moves. Something that goes ahead with the light. Something that keeps you at the gate until you are ready.Most of us reach for ours without noticing, which means we rarely get to call on it on purpose. Knowing yours changes how you meet the next change.Find out which Threshold Lover walks with you. Get full access to Vanessa Couto at vanessacouto.substack.com/subscribe

When you listen to an audiobook, a stranger's voice has been in your head for ten hours or more, and most of us never stop to wonder whose body it came out of.Christa Lewis narrates romance as Pippa Jayne. She takes apart what actually happens between a page and your ear: how she finds a character's voice, why she performs at thirty percent and leaves the rest to your imagination, what it costs a body to hold five people alive at once for so many hours.A book read aloud becomes a third thing. The author made a world. The narrator makes something separate inside it, shaped by her own life, her own losses, the people she did and didn't have. What reaches you is neither one alone. It isn't better than the book and it isn't worse. It's another way in. Change the voice and you'd get a different book entirely.The writing lives at vanessacouto.substack.com, and everything else at vanessacouto.com. Romancing the Threshold is a show about crossings, and how romance novels teach us to make them. Get full access to Vanessa Couto at vanessacouto.substack.com/subscribe

Romance novels are medicine for the crossing. Not a distraction from your life changing. Medicine for it.Season two of Romancing the Threshold opens on its own, with the idea the rest of it stands on. When a crossing is real, the thing that's missing is almost never information. Most of us know exactly what we should do, and we sit in the chair another year anyway, fully informed and completely immobile. What's missing is appetite. And appetite is what this genre keeps handing back.In this episode: the dream that moved me to Portland and taught me to follow an image long before I understand it. A stretch of depletion, and why romance was the only thing I could keep down. What Eros actually means, and why it goes quiet years before anything collapses. What the happily ever after is doing for the psyche, and why it's a matter of justice as much as feeling. Why "guilty pleasure" was never about the books. Where the eight Threshold Lovers came from. And the eight themselves, in the four pairs they arrive in.Take the quiz and find out which of the eight your season is calling for: https://www.vanessacouto.com/threshold-quizThe Anchor in the Storm has been the most common result by a distance. On why that might be, and on what anchors actually do: https://www.vanessacouto.com/writing/anchor-in-the-storm-trust-and-faithEssays, and the podcast in full, at vanessacouto.substack.comIf this one gave you something, pass it to the person you were thinking about while you listened. And follow the show wherever you're listening, so the next one turns up on its own. Get full access to Vanessa Couto at vanessacouto.substack.com/subscribe

Some doors close so quietly we forget our own hand was on them. Rebecca Nelson, a literature student and bookseller who helps run a romance book club, sat down to talk about what readers are looking for when they reach for romance. What unfolded was the story of her own crossing, a woman who had quietly written herself off and then, at midlife, began opening the doors again. A conversation about reading as company through change, the characters who unsettle us, and why being seen, on the page and across a bookstore counter, might be the quiet medicine underneath it all.If this episode found you, leave a review wherever you listen. It helps other readers find this work. And find the writing at vanessacouto.substack.com all the rest is at https://www.vanessacouto.com/Romancing the Threshold: a podcast about crossings, and the stories that carry us across. Get full access to Vanessa Couto at vanessacouto.substack.com/subscribe

The smallest things tend to carry the most: a fairy tale, a love story, a cup of tea made with real attention.Vanessa sits down with writer and fairy tale scholar Kelly Jarvis, whose debut novel, Sea and Stars (out July 7th), is a gothic retelling of Beauty and the Beast set between the Isle of Skye and the old whaling town of Mystic, Connecticut. Together they wander through why this one tale keeps returning to us, what it means to love the beast as he is rather than wait for him to become a prince, the magic that lives in the everyday, and why a lasting love might be built more from choice than from fate.A conversation about small magic, and the medicine that hides in what we were taught not to take seriously.Find the writing at vanessacouto.substack.com and everything else at vanessacouto.com. There's always room by the hearth. Get full access to Vanessa Couto at vanessacouto.substack.com/subscribe

Karla Sorensen writes contemporary romance set in the world of professional football, and inside her pages she's quietly doing something extraordinary: rendering grief with the care of someone who's apprenticed to it, drawing men from the inside of their armor, and writing women with their own sovereignty intact.In this conversation, we talk about how characters arrive (and refuse to leave), what the body of the writer knows that the mind doesn't, and the strange labor of bringing a story into being, of wrestling with it like Jacob with the angel until something cracks.A masterclass, by any honest measure. Come in.The full reflection on this episode lives at vanessacouto.substack.com Get full access to Vanessa Couto at vanessacouto.substack.com/subscribe

Content note: This episode touches briefly on a sexual assault scene from a romance novel as the entry point for our somatic conversation. The scene itself isn't described in detail. Please listen with care.What if the body of the reader is the third character in every romance novel — the one nobody talks about?In this episode, Vanessa sits down with Alan Massetti, somatic experiencing practitioner, to explore what actually happens in our nervous systems when we read. Why a scene from weeks ago can still be living in your body. Why arousal isn't just sexual. Why the reading slump might be your body asking for time to digest.This conversation widens what it means to read romance as medicine — and offers small, doable somatic practices for bringing the body into your reading life.For more, visit vanessacouto.substack.com. Get full access to Vanessa Couto at vanessacouto.substack.com/subscribe