I’m a guy and I almost hate romance novels for the false hopes they engender, even for the guys — hey, insofar as there’s no escaping a chick flick or other romantic drama, even guys are exposed to this nonsense. I mean, hey, I’m prone to sentimentality, too, but it’s not a realistic frame of mind for living a real life, you know?
So, okay, romance novels and the like are just fantasy, pure play. Nothing wrong with downtime, right? Except somehow they seem to have convinced everyone that such patently absurd behavior and situations are not just possible but probable and worst of all desirable — all that infantilism, all that egotism masquerading as “love.”
Now I know this makes me sound like a real killjoy, but I don’t care right now, I’m just making an observation and telling the truth about it no matter how disturbing. And the fact is that brainwashing ourselves like this sets us up for disappointment and failure! I know it would sound ridiculous to have them come with warning labels such as what cigarette manufacturers must provide but surely there is some way of at least warning impressionable young minds that this isn’t how things work in real life!
When watching action-thrillers the heroes will always take an epic beating (or six and seven) with hardly any evidence of so much as a scratch on them, yet no one expects anyone to perform similar feats of derring-do, so why do we expect romantic relationships to be as incredulously perfect and saccharine as those depicted in film and paperback??
Just a thought. And though the world will go about its sleepy-eyed muddle-headed ways I will always protest this terrible outrage where people are in effect made to feel bad for not living up to some absolutely artificial standard of behavior and interpersonal relationships, especially between the sexes where lust is concerned!