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

are everywhere. We’re not all looking for pirate kings who are secretly dukes, or tycoons of unspecified industry who need someone to pose as their fiancée 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 relationships, 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 heterosexual. Many are lesbian or gay individuals. By writing about male heroes, I do not mean to imply that only heterosexual people read romance, nor that romance can only take place between heterosexual 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 assembled 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 space, 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 cliché 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