Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels (7 page)
Read Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels Online
Authors: Sarah Wendell
Tags: #Family & Relationships, #Love & Romance
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 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.’”
