Taking Off The Rose-Tinted Glasses

Romance novels often consist of young, romantic girls and chivalrous men who save them from foibles and mishaps. However, in real life, men can often be the foibles and mishaps that make young women stumble!

Love is full of paradoxes.

The man a woman ends up marrying is someone she needs to trust with her whole heart, yet she cannot trust him fully until he has proven his commitment and devotion to her. So the wise woman guards her heart in the early stages of dating, which means that she is on guard with the one person that she hopes to trust completely one day.

Romantic women can have soft hearts, and can be easily swayed by their emotions. Yet while dating, a woman has to be tough-minded so that she doesn’t get taken in by a man who will break her heart. So the softer a woman’s heart the more she needs to protect it by not allowing this tender-heartedness to govern her behaviour. I suppose it’s like an egg – the hard outer shell of a woman’s hard-headedness protecting the soft insides.

In romance novels, the reader is always assured that the hero in the book is a good guy, and she has a deep comforting feeling that it’s all going to work out. Even if the hero seems to have bad qualities, a reader knows that by the end of the book, the author will have worked out all the potential issues. However, if a woman translates this attitude to real life there is potential for disaster! A woman has to be savvy to deal with a single man, especially if he is a stranger. No matter how much she might be open to love, she has to be aware that a man, in the beginning, does not have her best interests at heart. He has his best interests at heart. So a woman who is kind-hearted and giving, and is conditioned to putting others first, can very easily fall into the trap of doing this with a man she is dating. However, this is to her detriment if she puts his needs before her own, as she might end up with a man who wants to have the dating game entirely on his own terms.

If you read an historical Regency novel, you will see that women were extremely protected. They had fathers and brothers who looked out for their reputations, backed up by a society that looked out for their virtue. Generally, fathers and brothers knew exactly what single men were after, and protected sisters and daughters. Society backed this up by making marriage the route that respectable men had to take in order to have access to sex, so men and women married far younger than they do nowadays.

Now women have to provide that protection for themselves. Women don’t have society looking out for them, in terms of the values of today… Women are independent and can date whom they choose. Yet, often they aren’t aware that they might be entering a battlefield when they start dating and that if they aren’t correctly armoured they will be wounded.

The more romantic a woman is, the more armour she needs. And as romantic women don’t think of relationships as a battlefield, and are so open to love, they can make the mistake of believing that a man is just like them and wants what they want. This is dangerous thinking because a woman never knows what a man’s motives are when he starts a relationship with her. He might not start off a relationship looking for love and warmth and intimacy – he could simply be seeing the woman he’s dating as a challenge to be conquered.

In romance novels, you’ll notice that it is often only in the process of chasing an attractive woman that the hero’s emotions become involved and then, unexpectedly, he falls in love. That’s why it’s called falling in love… he didn’t expect it! I think romantic women always expect love. Men don’t necessarily. A woman needs to remember this in real life when dealing with the opposite sex, and not believe she’s being mean or rude when she doesn’t give a stranger her heart on a platter straight up. Take time to get to know someone before falling in love and “above all else, guard your heart for it is the wellspring of life” – Proverbs 4:23.

Read The Dashing Debutante, Lord Fenmore’s Wager and Send and Receive