And then there’s a whole subset of reasonbly good novels that are marketed as romance novels yet bear only a passing resemblance to a romance novel if you disregard the cover and blurbs. I find this weird and frustrating. I’ve just finished reading a reasonbly entertaining mystery/cop drama series (recommended by my mother of all people) that’s marketed as romance, and yet the only whiff of romance is that the main character is a) married, b) female, and c) has occasional steamy sex with her husband.
Edit: Aaaaaand I realize I totally failed to answer the OP - the answer is “no, not particularly. I find that a playah is always a playah and I don’t need that chaos in my world. Turns out my husband was once a mild sort of playboy in his younger days, but I married him in spite of that, rather than because of it - and he’d given up his playboying well before we met.”
From a sociobiological perspective, it makes sense to me. If you assume that a male wants to mate with as many females as possible, the “best” males will mate with a lot of females. Think of peacocks, bower birds, elephant seals. As a female, I obviously want the “best,” but don’t want to share.
Perhaps the above makes it obvious that I don’t have much of a romantic fantasy life. I think I’m a bit too analytical.
But if I did, sure, I think I’d fantasize about having a nice alpha-male all my own. Millionaire entrepreneur, pro athlete, best-selling author, something like that. Why fantasize about the drabness of reality?
In real life, though, no, I don’t have any interest in dating someone who will create high drama in my life.
I don’t fantasize about it – I’m living it. My husband was a player before we met. Lots of girlfriends, lots of casual sex, lots of broken hearts. One very brief marriage (9 months) because he ‘thought it was time.’ He says that he was never in love until he met me – he never even knew what it was like to be in love until then. No fewer than 8 people came to me when I started dating him and warned me off him – “He’ll never settle down.” “He’ll break your heart.” Etc.
I admit it, I read a not insignificant number of romance novels. And I laugh at myself sometimes, because, frankly, no, in real life, my ideal partner would not be someone with a long line of past lovers. Nor would a number of other common romance novel conventions likely be true. And yet for pure mindless enjoyment reading, it’s hard for me to beat a good romance novel. (Bad ones, not so much on the pure enjoyment thing.)
It’s been a while since my romance reading phase but I would have to say that I like it when the heroine has something to feel a bit competitive or jealous about. I don’t think a promiscuous man is particularly attractive or anything but in the context of a romance novel it’s nice when he’s a “scoundrel” because then there’s the tension when her pride doesn’t allow her to be just another notch and she tries to resist. It also means that she can regret it when she does sleep with him so that facilitates the “false dawn.”
It’s not an ideal or anything. I wouldn’t want my love life to be like a romance novel any more than I’d want my life to be like a detective novel or adventure story. To the degree that I like romances like that, it’s because they’re an escape from reality. In a romance everything is very ordered and there are no loose ends. After a terrible day the heroine goes to bed early instead of staying up and brooding. When someone gets caught in the rain a few pages later she’ll be by the fire with a hot drink and blanket. Nobody ever prematurely ejaculates in anyone’s face. You know! Complete opposite of our horrible universe. But you wouldn’t really want your life to be that way because then you’d be married to a he-slut by the age of 20 and where would you go from there?
I’m another inexperienced nerd-lover. I like tall physics majors. And I married one (who promptly changed to CS), and he’s nice and steady and reliable, and I like him that way.
Romance novels have never been my cup of tea, and I am suspicious of and ooged-out by player types.
So I was the only one to read the thread title and think of this sort of romance novel convention, right?
Anyway, although I don’t think reforming a player sounds like fun, I’ve known women who have found it appealing. They’ve liked the challenge as best as I could tell. It’s like that monster bass that everyone talks about hiding in the pond, but no one has ever managed to reel in. If they can reform the bad boy, it’d be a major coup.
Hmm. I think I’d better say in my defense that I didn’t hook up with my husband in hopes of ‘reforming’ him. I am not a reader of romance novels and this particular stereotype of the genre isn’t one I would have been drawn to. In general, I think it’s useless to try and reform anyone of anything. I didn’t know my husband was a player when I met him – he really didn’t have a womanizer type of demeanor. By the time people began warning me about him, it was too late – I was in love with him and I figured, in my optimistic way, that it would work out. And, fortunately for me, it did.
But I feel my luck – I really wouldn’t recommend a womanizer as long-term relationship material, usually. I think my husband is very much an exception to the usual rule there.
I second that. I get teased relentlessly by the girls at work about it. I thought they were going to have a stroke when I told them I thought guys with glasses were sexy (I was referring to Alton Brown specifically at the time - but it’s true in general for me)…
To the OP. I haven’t read more than a half a dozen romance novels in my life, so I don’t really think my opinion would really hold water. But, for me, I am not attracted to players in real life or in print. However, substitute brooding loner for playboy and now we’re talking Either way, fine as fantasy but not for real life. It always works out in the novels, in real life I imagine the percentage is quite a bit lower.
And the even more annoying ‘he treats her like crap, but she luuuurves him so’. I can’t understand why emotional/mental abuse is treated as some sort of laudable character trait in romance novels!
Depends. I’m not looking to get married at the mo’, so it wouldn’t bother me to know the guy I was dating had had mostly casual, short relationships in the past, because I’m not really specifically looking for something different. If I were looking for that One True Romance that will someday see me celebrating my 50th wedding anniversary – the playa’s pretty much out. Why would I date a guy in order to change him? I’d rather date a guy in order to spend some time with him, and maybe get me some nookie.
I prefer to purchase my porn without the ‘thinly veiled’ part, if at all possible. And I second (third? eighth? ninety-first?) the praise of geeky boys. I loves me a guy who knows some math and rocks a pair of dorky glasses. Who cares how bad his eyesight is without them when the lights are low and he’s sitting six inches away from me, anyhow?
I’ve never encountered that in a romance novel. Sometimes the man gives the woman cause for tears owing to a plot complication (quite often a simple misunderstanding, or something entirely beyond his control), but he always feels bad about it and makes it right before the end.
The problem in real life with this is, if the guy is finally is tamed, then she’s no longer attracted to him - since he’s no longer the savage beast that attracted her in the first place.
That’s why I can’t read the Harlequins. Practically all of them include the guy being an emotionally abusive arrogant prick and the woman fighting him until she realizes that he was right all along and falling in line. He’s also usually filthy rich and either Italian, Greek or Arabian. It just got too disturbing to me to keep reading them.
I like romance novels, I freely admit it, but that’s really not what I’m interested in. Most of the ones I read the guy is usually a dark brooding loner type who was hurt deeply in the past (in some form or fashion, not necessarily love) and just needs the right woman to bring light and love into his life. Even better if the series has a well thought out or researched world/our world but twisted thing going on. Like the Dark Hunter books, or certain spy ones.
Either way, fine as fantasy but not for real life. It always works out in the novels, in real life I imagine the percentage is quite a bit lower.
And I second (third? eighth? ninety-first?) the praise of geeky boys. I loves me a guy who knows some math and rocks a pair of dorky glasses. Who cares how bad his eyesight is without them when the lights are low and he’s sitting six inches away from me, anyhow?