Men are looking for love in the wrong places. I write about what women really want

Recently, I spoke at the inaugural Readings Romance Festival in Melbourne, which sold out in 48 hours. One of my favourite Australian romance writers, Anita Heiss, opened by talking about why she writes about love. Authors and readers talked about sex, relationships and, on my panel, the “meet-cute”: the moment when two future lovers collide.

There was barely a man in sight.

Earlier this year, I spoke at Brisbane’s Blussh Romance Festival and saw the same thing: hundreds of women discussing exactly what they want from the people they date, and almost no men there to hear it.

It’s not that straight men don’t want to know what women want. I think they really do. They’re spending hours looking for answers in dating podcasts, watching YouTube videos promising to explain women and in the corners of the manosphere that don’t seem to like us very much.

I distinctly remember learning at school that when a boy insulted me, he might actually be “negging” me, a pickup technique popularised by Neil Strauss’ 2005 book The Game. Now we have “sexual market value”, “high-value men” and endless theories about “female nature”. All new ways of delivering the same old message: if you want to understand women, ask another man.

As a romance writer, this drives me mad. Women have spent decades writing whole novels about what we think and want, yet some men would still rather hear another man explain it into a microphone. For some reason, those voices are taken seriously while romance, a literal peek inside a woman’s mind, is dismissed as “fluff”.

But men who dismiss romance fiction – or have simply never thought it was written for them – miss out on more than dating advice. I recently read that fiction strengthens the social skills we use to connect with others. And I can’t think of another genre more interested in human connection. Romance, in my opinion, gives us one of the most nuanced explorations of desire, power, vulnerability and what it means to be truly known by another person.

And romance takes happiness seriously too. The lovers might be hockey players or enemies forced to share a bed or even a woman and the blue alien who abducted her (there really is a subgenre for everyone), but every romance must, under all circumstances, promise a happy ending. It’s one of the genre’s few defining rules and what separates a romance from a love story. So, when you read romance, the question isn’t whether happiness is possible, but what the characters will have to learn or risk to achieve it. If more men read romance, I’d argue they’d become more hopeful about love itself.

So, what do I think men will find inside a romance novel? Probably not what they expect. Sure, the genre has plenty of handsome, rich and excellently forearmed men. But writing romances has taught me that being hot isn’t enough. We’re always asking: has he made himself vulnerable? Is he kind? Does he actually make her life better … or is he just tall? Those are the moments our readers always remember: when he asks what she wants, listens and acts accordingly. Swoon! (The same approach also makes for excellent sex scenes, according to our DMs.)

Romance hasn’t always got this right. In the 1972 bestseller The Flame and the Flower, the protagonist falls in love with her rapist. I grew up when Twilight’s Edward Cullen sabotaging Bella’s truck to control where she went was considered just another reason to be Team Edward. Thankfully, romance has come a long way, and today’s best books show there’s nothing sexier than enthusiastic consent and respect. Even my favourite trope, enemies-to-lovers, only works when both characters have agency.

Of course, women aren’t a monolith, and one Emily Henry novel won’t explain us. That’s exactly why I think men should read more romance novels. They give you hundreds of pages with women who want completely different things. Read enough and you realise there is no single woman to figure out, there are just women, plural.

So, men, here’s my advice: put down the dating podcast and enter the romance section without fear. Read romantic comedies, historical romance, sports romance, romantasy, queer romance and love stories by people whose lives look nothing like yours.

You won’t finish one book knowing what women want. Thank God, because we don’t all want the same thing! But you might finish it with fewer theories about us and more curiosity about the woman you’re actually dating.

Romance won’t teach you how to “decode” women. But it might teach you to stop trying.

Ali Berg is a Melbourne writer, co-founder of Books on the Rail and co-author of four bestselling romantic comedy novels.

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