Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels by Sarah Wendell Read Free Book Online Page A

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, shine, 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 shirt is unbuttoned 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 fashion 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 sex, 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 shirt 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 buttock.
    Really.
    It is true that sometimes the male characters are idealized, and the sex 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 analyze 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