WOMEN spend a lot of time preparing for, and recovering from romantic involvements," says Peg Grymes, author of The Romance Trap. "At times romance seems to consume us. We spend endless hours watching romantic comedies, romantic dramas, romantic tragedies. We have kept an industry afloat with our demand for romantic novels."

Who could argue? From the repetitive plots of Mills & Boon to the current vogue for high booted heroes in Jane Austen adaptations, it seems there's a romantic something for everyone in the female audience. Grymes's book argues that romance is not harmless, frivolous fun, but an insidious trap which thwarts women's attempts at autonomy and sours relationships with men.

Romance is "an invention of the 16th century," Grymes argues. "The troubadors who invented the concept were in many ways experimenting with a human emotion. They were playful with the idea, they didn't really mean it. But we have taken the words of the troubadours literally and taken romance into our lives for real."

In best "personal is political" tradition, Grymes uses her own life as illustration of her theories. She grew up in New York, the seventh, youngest child in an Irish American home. Her father was a cop in New York City who drank too much and died young, her mother a secretary who put her daughter through college. After an undergraduate degree at Berkeley, she took the obligatory Euro backpack trip and arrived in Ireland in 1985, where she met Liam, her future husband, a man who, like her father, was "fond of the drink".

A few years and a baby later, with the marriage foundering ("everything felt dead, I felt dead inside") she met another man. "As he ran his finger down my back, I froze and melted at the same time. It had been so long since I felt such good company... I knew I should keep it within limits but for the moment I did not worry. I felt lovely."

That feeling, however, did not last.

It was months before she was to question her judgment about her lover. In the meantime, she and her husband embarked on a trial separation.

"Even when I was in the midst of a relationship that had proved hollow I still went on and grasped at another man. Why? The way I see it now, it could have been an affair but it could have been something else. Women will tug at different things some go shopping, some try booze, all are looking for that buzz, that momentary satisfaction, a way of filling the empty spaces.

"We choose affairs because we're always told to look towards men whenever we want to give - meaning to our lives. My affair was a failure of imagination on my part. That's why I believe romance to be a feminist issue. We're going to continue to grasp at romance until it is suggested to us that there are lots of other ways to express our passions."

Feminism has been suggesting Just this for almost 30 years. But it seems almost obligatory these days when writing a book on women's lives to bemoan the inadequate contributions of other feminists. Last year it was Maureen Freely with her treatise on motherhood, subtitled The Women Feminism Forgot, who breezily ignored several other books and articles on the theme. Now it's the turn of Grymes.

The Romantic Trap, its blurb tells us, "examines feminism's failure to confront the allure of romantic illusion". But has there been such a failure? Surely there is a large and growing body of feminist writings on romance - psychoanalytic theory which examines why women are attracted to something so detrimental to their own interests; theories which explore romantic discourse in a sociological context; work on the attraction of women towards the romantic genre in fiction, music and popular culture work on how romance props up institutions of heterosexuality and the family. All this is driven by a wish to understand why romance has so attracted women and questioning the ways in which it has resonated in women's lives.

Grymes explains that she doesn't like to read "too widely" before commencing a work. "I prefer to approach a subject fresh and work my own way through what it means in my life." Is there not then a danger of saying something that has already been said? "Maybe, but I, am adding my voice, my experience. I hope the way I tell my message may reach a new audience, women who might not buy a feminist book, younger women who might feel feminism has nothing to say to them."

What she has done is to put on record a period of growth in her life - growth both in personal autonomy and political consciousness. And she is brave, in her intimate and honest expose, but also in the clear analysis of the meaning of her experiences.

Writing the book wad a catharsis and "surprisingly," she says, "the lessons I learned for my survival were the same that could save my marriage". She broke up with her lover, moved back to New York with her husband, and they have since had a baby together.

BUT if to any incurable romantic this sounds like happy ever after, Grymes was quick to point out that the wellspring of her new found contentment is not her marriage but herself. "Basically, I like myself and I feel I will be all right," she concludes. "I think this would be the case whether or not my husband and I had reunited.

Instead of investing their hopes in romance, Grymes believes women should "desire many creative wishes for the multiple facets of ourselves. Then, even when love disappoints us and romance proves to be an illusion, we will know that our futures can be fulfilled independently. A diversity of wishes will sustain us."