Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels Part 2

Amber G. also figured out some basics of interpersonal relations.h.i.+ps from really annoying plot devices: "Romance taught me...that pa.s.sive aggressive behaviour is aggravating. n.o.body ends up happy when someone is upset and then waits for the other person to read their mind, getting angry when this obviously never happens."

Merriam has had an identical experience: "When the 'big misunderstanding' in a story is caused by a failure to communicate, it not only annoys me but it reminds me to try and be more open and to talk more about what the issue is, or what is going on in my real life. I am also much clearer about what I am looking for in the other person because I have tried on for size the heroes in romance stories. I also think you can't underestimate the role of redemption in romance novels, with their message that we all get things wrong and must consciously work on fixing what is broken."

Romances also teach that the heroine can be strong and that s.e.x is not the only method through which to achieve intimacy, nor is it always the advisable or even the safest choice. Erotica author Eve Savage says that romances have helped her define what makes for a strong relations.h.i.+p-and what makes for an adventurous relations.h.i.+p as well: "Romances have definitely had an impact in my life. I didn't start reading them until later (early to mid '90s), and by then they'd evolved from the 'wimpy heroine/raping hero' style to the 'confident but flawed heroine/strong yet sensitive hero' style. This enabled me to realize relations.h.i.+ps are about compromise. They helped me understand I was worth something and that most important lesson-s.e.x does not equal love."

Savage is not the only person who discovered and explored her own self-worth and relations.h.i.+ps through the writing of romances. A writer who wished to remain anonymous and went by the name "anonapotamus," thereby earning a huge giggle and my respect forever, writes that it wasn't reading romance but writing romance that helped her slowly realize that her marriage was not ideal and that she deserved better for herself: "The more I learned about crafting stories, the more I told myself, 'It's a fantasy-this isn't how real guys think and act; it's how we (women) want to believe they think and act.' And I convinced myself that what I had was as good as it was going to get. More, I think somewhere deep down inside, I kept waiting to get through the bad times to the big payoff on the other side.

"I am also much clearer about what I am looking for in the other person because I have tried on for size the heroes in romance stories."-MERRIAM, A READER

"Twelve years, thirty-plus books, and some therapy later, I'm newly single, happier than I've been in a long time, and ready to Not f.u.c.king Settle this time around. In the meantime, I've got a career I love and family, writer friends, and wonderful stories to keep me company."

Another writer who goes by the name Odette Lovegood used romance to help her overcome her own shyness when she met someone she was tremendously interested in-and who was just as shy. But instead of reading it, she and her boyfriend collaborate on fiction with strong romance plotlines: "Writing romance allowed us to get to know one another and express our feelings in ways we never could have otherwise. It got me in touch with my own s.e.xuality, and made me realize that s.e.x isn't something to be afraid of."

Reader and writer Sarah W. (no, not me) says that the books she read helped her figure out what kind of person she didn't want to be with-and figure out the goals for her own parenting: "Oddly enough, the rape-y, obsessive, I-hate-you-because-I-love-you, he-loves-me-so-it's-okay romances that were popular (or at least crowded the shelves at the library and the used bookstore) when I was growing up showed me how wrong that sort of behavior is. My own characters (female or male) don't stand for that-or don't by the end of the story. And I'm raising my kids to know that real love is so much more than...drama and that they're worth so much more."

WHO WERE THESE RAPETASTIC a.s.sCLOWN HEROES?.

Once upon a time, not so far behind us, romance novels were often populated by heroes who would be a half-step from a restraining order today. They were autocratic, they were self-important, and their goal was to break the maidenhead of the heroine, often by force or forced seduction, such as overwhelming her with a.s.sertive s.e.xual conduct until the poor, overwrought, confused thing could no longer think for herself. Think of it as the historical equivalent of a roofie, only written in purple prose. If this sounds miserable, well, it often was. These are what we call Old Skool romances. The focus of the Old Skool romance is most often the heroine, because the stories were mostly about her journey to self-discovery and o.r.g.a.s.ms described in terminology usually reserved for natural phenomena. The heroines of Old Skool romances are often helpless under the influence of the alpha male a.s.sholes (whom we call alpholes), and while these books reflected the s.e.xual ambivalence of the time in which they were published, they are not always popular with romance readers today.

Caroline, another eager romance reader, agrees that identifying behavior that repulses you in fictional portrayals makes it a lot d.a.m.n easier to spot it in real life: "Romance novels taught me it is never OK to let a man take advantage of you. I was so turned off in my early reading years with the 'force my mighty sword-o-lovin' on you and you will love and loathe me for it' storyline. Ick. I remember never allowing a guy to just s...o...b..r and grope his way about without my explicit permission, remembering how awful it sounded when I read scenes such as that. The 'I can't stop, I'm so in l.u.s.t and out of control for you' line never worked on me. A knee to your groin will help then, right? Romance novels [also] taught me it is OK to fantasize, and dream, and take pleasure in someone else's happy ending without needing to compare my own happy ending, or dejectedly pine that my romantic life sucks. It's fiction, it's fantasy, and it's healthy, but it's not real."

"Romance novels taught me it is never OK to let a man take advantage of you."-CAROLINE, A READER

Emotions are tricky, and, as Smart b.i.t.c.hes cofounder Candy Tan wrote in our book Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart b.i.t.c.hes' Guide to Romance Novels, we are, especially in the United States, taught early that emotions are squicky, uncomfortable things that should not be talked about and certainly not displayed too much. Some people are very skilled at dampening their own emotions, and the safe harbor of reading romance and knowing that the emotional response you might feel for the characters or the story will end happily and without loss or grief is an equally safe s.p.a.ce to explore emotions one might not otherwise want to feel at all. One reader, Em, writes, "I'm a fairly emotionally dead person when it comes to real life, so fiction gives me people I can care about without the pain that caused my apathy in the first place. Romance novels-being so emotionally charged-are the best for that."

Amber G. is a shy person who figured out with the help of romance novels how she might interact with people she doesn't know: "The first thing romance as a genre did for me was teach me about flirting. It was romance that taught me how to smile, how to meet someone's eyes, that relaxing was good and so was dressing nicely and looking as though I cared."

"The first thing romance did for me was teach me about flirting. It was romance that taught me how to smile."-AMBER G., A READER

Jill Q. says, "I think what romances taught me was that it was OK to feel and have positive emotions, to be an optimist not just about love, but about anything. I think romance, like all genre fiction, generally has a positive message. You can stop the evil overlord, catch the murderer, fall in love. Be proactive about your life and good things will happen."

Amanda M. says that when she was reading romances as a teen, "it was quite rea.s.suring to read the 'plain girl gets the guy' stories. I was just entering that very awful awkward stage with gaining weight in the wrong places, gaining in the right place but not being ready for it, pimples, and all that other stuff. I was not only an ugly duckling, but a shy, lonely duckling. But I read books where the heroine was sometimes plump and plain, yet her intelligence and sweetness earned her love from a good man. It helped me to keep believing that even if I wasn't the beautiful, vivacious prom queen, I still deserved and could find someone who loved me without a miraculous makeover."

"You look good," Cal said, with enough tension in his voice to make it an understatement.

"It's not a fat dress," Min said, turning back to the mirror. "It doesn't hide anything."

"Haven't we talked about this?" Cal said, coming to stand behind her.

"Yes, but my mother has talked since then," Min said. "Also, there's this mirror which tells me I don't have much of a waistline."

"You have a waistline." Cal put his hands on her hips. "It's right here." He slid his hands across her stomach and she s.h.i.+vered, watching him touch her in the mirror. With Cal's hands on her, she looked different, good, and when he pulled her back against his chest, she relaxed into him and let her head fall back on his shoulder. "Very s.e.xy dress," he whispered into her ear, and then kissed her neck. She drew in her breath and he whispered, "Very s.e.xy woman," and moved his hand up to her neckline, drawing his finger down the edge of the silky fabric, making her shudder as the heat spread and she began to feel liquid everywhere.

"I have to stop drinking wine when I'm with you," she whispered to him in the mirror. "I start believing all this garbage you tell me."

-BET ME BY JENNIFER CRUSIE, 2008 In addition to owning ourselves, romance novels teach women to be confident in our strengths. Reading about heroines who have a continual need to please gets old, unless that heroine learns to please herself first. Selflessness is not an admirable trait when it means you give away everything about yourself, and that includes both men and women. I'm not saying selfishness is the key to being heroic-it surely is not. But molding yourself to the expectations of others is not heroic either, and misleads everyone, including you, and makes for a heroine about as exciting and pa.s.sionate as plain yogurt at room temperature.

The trick to being the heroine of your own story is being happy with who you are. Confidence and accomplishment are hot d.a.m.n s.e.xy.

Certainly women are bombarded with messages that they should achieve perfection in the eyes of everyone around them, but the same messages are sent to men as well. The trick to being the heroine of your own story is being happy with who you are. Confidence and accomplishment are hot d.a.m.n s.e.xy.

Just as there is no one single type of romance novel, there is no one way to read romance, and there's no one way that readers use their romance-reading. Women read romance and bring it into their lives in many, many different ways. Identifying their own likes, desires, and senses of worth-and of being worth the effort so they don't feel the need to settle for less than what they want-is only part of the value of romance for the reader. In addition to knowing ourselves, we also know happiness, and romance makes readers happy in a myriad of ways.

Happiness, much like something spilling in the fridge, has a trickle-down effect, only much less sticky.

Now, this is not to say that romance readers are unhappy. They are not miserable and seeking panacea and palliative emotional fluffing in their reading. Most romance readers are happy already-and their reading material increases their joy and allows them to bring it to others. Would you rather have your dinner with your happy mom or your unhappy mom, your happy wife or your unhappy wife? Happiness, much like something spilling in the fridge, has a trickle-down effect, only much less sticky.

Romance readers bring their romance to life as they read it and find happiness, and they bring that happiness to their lives after they're done reading. As Harlequin's research has revealed, romance readers give themselves the gifts of time, quiet, peace, and hopeful optimism as they read-and they bring those gifts to others. In doing so, they recognize themselves and find validation and affirmation for their own desire for happiness.

And, equally important, after they learn to identify what they want in a relations.h.i.+p, they learn they can and will find it.

We Know More Than a Few Good Men

Ah, romance heroes. If you judge the books by their covers (and really, I can't tell you enough that you shouldn't be doing that), then you have a pretty powerful, well-muscled idea of what a romance hero should look like. In fact, copying the appearance of a romance novel cover model is not that difficult, provided you can work out for many, many hours, eat lean protein, and flex your biceps and abdominal wall for hours on end.

Once you've acquired the musculature, which only takes a few unending months of nonstop bodybuilding, the payoff is that the rest is easy.

SIX SIMPLE STEPS TO LOOKING LIKE THE QUINTESSENTIAL ROMANCE HERO.

STEP 1.

Acquire a mullet.

STEP 2.

Spend an uncommonly long time working on the style, s.h.i.+ne, and bounceability of that mullet.

STEP 3.

Don't let anyone but the heroine touch your mullet. (That is not a euphemism. No, wait, it could be.) STEP 4.

Maintain a state of partial undress wherein your s.h.i.+rt is unb.u.t.toned but still tucked in.

STEP 5.

Ensure that the wind is buffeting your manly chestular landscape in as flattering a manner as possible.

STEP 6.

Be careful of your strategically placed weapon. Sometimes, ok, a lot of the time, there is a gun pointed business-end-down in the waistband of your pants. Or, perhaps there's a sword, unsheathed, of course, along side your femoral artery. All I'm saying is, be careful. You'll put your eye out.

In reality, the most common image of romance manhood as depicted on the covers is as ridiculous as the idea that mullets were ever a solid fas.h.i.+on choice for one's hair. And because of the over-the-top, top-heavy images of males in romance, one of the most common accusations tossed in the direction of readers is that all that romance reading gives women unrealistic expectations of love, of s.e.x, and of men in general. Too much romance and we readers will expect our men to be as muscled as the men on the covers, as well-coiffed and overdeveloped and as clueless about normal s.h.i.+rt wearing as the average model. That visual perfection of the cover has, unfortunately, intimidated more than one mortal male, who thought that the men inside were as outsized and overly perfect as the depiction on the cover.

Once again: deep-fried bullpucky.

Let me get the obvious hero business out of the way first: Romance readers do not expect real men to closely echo and emulate the heroes of our nearest romance novel. No, not even that one, with the buns so tight you could bounce a yak off his left b.u.t.tock.

Really.

It is true that sometimes the male characters are idealized, and the s.e.x is sometimes-okay, frequently-idealized. More importantly, the male depicted on the cover more often than not bears no resemblance to the hero of the story itself. But readers can tell the difference between fantasy and reality when it comes to actual human males-and they're smart enough to know how the fantasy can educate and inform their own reality. Nowhere is this more obvious than with men.

We do not expect real men to look like the men on our books.

Men in romance novels, to quote my husband, are not real dudes. Real dudes don't usually think about their emotions as much as heroes do in a novel. Most real dudes do not sit and ruminate for hours about their attraction to a person or a.n.a.lyze their feelings. Whether it's cultural inculcation or gender difference-and my money is on the former, not the latter-men aren't going to spend a few pages' worth of narration pondering their deep and abiding emotional bond with a woman.

This is not to say that men do not have feelings. They absolutely do-but since emotional display is unseemly at best and emasculating at worst, particularly among men in most cultures, there aren't always going to be those deep and squishy moments as there are in romances.

But improbable muscles, deep emotional pondering, and squishy feelings aside, real romance heroes are everywhere. We're not all looking for pirate kings who are secretly dukes, or tyc.o.o.ns of unspecified industry who need someone to pose as their fiancee to close a tricky business deal. We know these men don't exist in plentiful supply, much less at all.

But we do know that there are many good men (and women) out there, and most of us, since most romance readers are in relations.h.i.+ps, have already found one. We can separate reality from ridiculous, fact from fiction, and find real-life men who are real-life romance heroes, in small and magnificent moments.

Note: I am speaking specifically about men in this chapter, but by no means are all romance fans heteros.e.xual. Many are lesbian or gay individuals. By writing about male heroes, I do not mean to imply that only heteros.e.xual people read romance, nor that romance can only take place between heteros.e.xual couples. Heroism exists in both genders; in this chapter I'm speaking specifically about male stereotypes, archetypes, and daguerreotypes. Okay, not that last one, but you get the point.

The appearance of the romance hero, all muscled and mullety, is not the reality of the romance hero. The romance hero can be found in just about anyone. For example, as I write this, my husband has taken our two children to a Disney children's show, ON ICE, so that I would have total quiet and isolation in which to work. That is a romance hero. I hear he is possibly eating a flavored ice out of Jessie the Cowgirl's head, much like devouring icy cold BRAAAAINS.

Little moments a.s.sembled together make the romance hero. The man who brings you a drink after a very long and brain-frazzling day or who walks through the door, sees you on your last moment of patience, and turns around to fetch take-out for dinner-that's a romance hero. The man who holds a door, who notices you need a hand, or who shows up to simply be there when you're facing something difficult-that's a romance hero.

As an article in the Boston Globe in October 2009 by oncologist Robin Schoenthaler stated, the ideal man is not the one with the biggest bank account or the extreme sports habit, but is the man who will hold your purse in the cancer clinic:

"I became acquainted with what I've come to call great 'purse partners' at a cancer clinic in Waltham. Every day these husbands drove their wives in for their radiation treatments, and every day these couples sat side by side in the waiting room, without much fuss and without much chitchat. Each wife, when her name was called, would stand, take a breath, and hand her purse over to her husband. Then she'd disappear into the recesses of the radiation room, leaving behind a stony-faced man holding what was typically a white vinyl pocketbook. On his lap. The guy-usually retired from the trades, a grandfather a dozen times over, a Sox fan since date of conception-sat there silently with that purse. He didn't read, he didn't talk, he just sat there with the knowledge that twenty feet away technologists were preparing to program an unimaginably complicated X-ray machine and aim it at the mother of his kids.

"I'd walk by and catch him staring into s.p.a.ce, holding hard onto the pocketbook, his big gnarled knuckles clamped around the clasp, and think, 'What a prince.'"

OUR FAVORITE ROMANCE HEROES.

Is there a difference between real-life heroes and romance-novel heroes? Le Duh. Of course there is. But beneath the stereotypical imagery and the unfortunate typecasting that men in fiction and in entertainment endure, there are real men who are romance heroes. It may be so traditional it's almost cliche to joke about men who don't do dishes or help with housework or even actively parent-but more often than not, men are strong and worthy partners and are the exception to that demeaning stereotype. And as I said earlier, we do not expect men to look like the men on our books. But that doesn't mean we don't and shouldn't expect men to at times act like the heroes of our books. Fortunately, so many of them do.

Every romance reader has a favorite type of hero or a favorite character. As I wrote on the website awhile back, my favorite heroes are a mix. Sometimes I love reading the abidingly constant loving man with h.o.r.n.ypants, often portrayed as waiting for the heroine to wake up and realize he is perfect for her, but not sure what to do with his feelings in the meantime. Other times I adore reading the "I don't like you, you drive me nuts, I can't stop thinking about your hair, DAMMIT!" hero.

The ideal man is not the one with the biggest bank account or the extreme sports habit, but is the man who will hold your purse in the cancer clinic.

One hero I love rereading is Ethan from the Nora Roberts Chesapeake Bay series. Yet I would totally be wary of him in real life. Quiet but intense is fun to read about: "What's going on under the surface? I can't tell-a puzzle! Fun!" The same character is not so fun in real life: "I know there's something going on under the surface but I can't read what it is. It's a mystery...that makes him possibly creepy."

What do I learn from reading about Ethan, who is a very damaged and yet very honorable hero? What do I learn about real people while reading about a fictional person? I learn that a person can change and outgrow a painful past that's cut by abuse and cruelty, and I learn that as much as someone might prefer not to have feelings at all and try to suppress them, the experience of good feelings-or really, really, really good feelings-is worth the pain and trouble of dealing with all those other pesky emotions. I learn the value and power of loyalty, and how families can be made when you're an adult.

All valuable lessons and, in my opinion, important things to know about people that I might not otherwise have understood without that fictional portrayal. That's the nice thing about romances: real emotions and, in the hands of a skilled writer, almost-real people, existing in totally fictional circ.u.mstances.

Most romance readers have a favorite hero, or heroes, and the reason why that hero is a favorite is often revealing-as is the fact that readers share many common favorites. When I asked the readers of my site which types of heroes they adored, the answers were not as varied as I'd expected-though this is by far only a small sampling of the many, many flavors of romance hero out there for your reading pleasure.

THE CARE-GIVING ALPHA MALE.