The Festival of Romance is the United Kingdom's only festival dedicated to romance fiction. There authors, readers and the occasional pollster can mingle and discuss their genre of choice. Ahead of this October's event the organisers have given romance writers a brief questionnaire, hoping for an insight into the minds of the women who write books about women falling in love with muscular, confident billionaires with full heads of hair and gloriously thick eyelashes. A series of characteristics were presented and the novelists then asked to rate the importance of each in their ideal partner. How would wealth, paternal feelings, love-making abilities and willingness to communicate honestly feature alongside such certainties as physique, dress sense and misogyny?
Each author was given a balanced list of personality traits and invited to score them as either Essential, Desirable or Not Important. Those most widely agreed upon were taken as gospel and will soon appear in your future romance heroes, as well as all those calculating men who read this weblog for helpful hints for dating game improvement. Do you have a pen and paper or computer nearby? If so, results are in. The essentials every male must provide are loyalty, honesty, personal hygiene, kindness, sense of humour, intelligence and principles. Preferred, but optional, are weight, bedroom skills, height, self-confidence and attractiveness. Finally, there were the choices that women deemed entirely irrelevant, such as the man's car, his religious and political persuasions, and his social and financial standings. What, no cooing at babies in supermarkets, eyelashes that flutter in the gentle breeze, enigmatic gift-buying, Hugh Jackman-similarity, steely blue eyes, Mediterranean descent, or pasts shrouded in secrecy? Nothing of his career as CEO or mysterious tycoon, and no mention of worthwhile credentials such as romantic, divorced or cool with feminism. What the hell, novelists?
The findings are eye-opening, but largely meaningless, as romance authors knew their answers would be collected and then released onto this world web and copied into newspapers, blogs and college theses. Because of this many of the more obvious buzzwords such as loyalty, honesty and kindness can be easily dismissed for a variety of reasons. What sort of woman would willingly choose a cruel, unfaithful liar, despite the quality of his car and wicked wit? Furthermore, sense of humour and intelligence can be discounted with similar reasoning. The essentials feature heavily in the creation of a Harlequin hero, and even more so in modern chick-lit. However, it is peculiar to see principles rated so highly and yet religious and political persuasions barely considered, as if the women taking part in the poll were not clear what some of those words might have meant. Personal hygiene, though, is something of a stand-out among the other imperative ingredients in husband material, but when you are fruitlessly searching for eyelash thickness and no sign of male pattern baldness perhaps personal hygiene could be considered an appropriate euphemism.
As expected of a survey where those taking part are likely to lie despite their exultation of honesty, categories such as wealth and social standing were not only not considered desirable, but in fact thought unimportant, again suggesting some confusion over the meaning of the word desirable. For this statement to be treated credibly, however, there would surely be clues found in romantic literature. Typically a heroine sees material success in her man as inconsequential to their spiritual value, yet an evolutionary study of romance titles found prosperity is regarded as highly appealing for the benefit of the welfare of the heroine and the couple's eventual children. Where a consensus formed the choices were usually predictable. Ninety-one per cent of the fifty-eight authors polled said loyalty was essential, and seventy-nine per cent agreed that a good car was not a deal-breaking factor. Curiously, however, a handful of options do not show up in the results under any category, implying split opinion over such qualities as loving his family, loving animals, being adventurous, owning property, showing a sensitive nature and being able to fix the computer and connecting the television to the DVD player.
Following on from whatever the first part of the poll was supposed to accomplish, the Romance Festival continued on to pose some serious questions. Once the day-dreaming was completed, the writers were queried over their beliefs toward notions of eternal love, whether men have become more sensitive in recent years and whether anyone wishes to share their own memories of having their heart ripped from their chest and trampled upon, figuratively-speaking. Surprisingly, eighty-six per cent of a small selection of romance writers admitted to being romantic at heart, although half of them confessed to having been disappointed in love. Still, the majority proved themselves modern and progressive, saying marriage was not the only way to declare love, and accepting that eternal love is something of a myth. However, many said they retained hope of finding life partners, which while showing faith in love, does not show a keen understanding of the concept of eternity. Sixty-four per cent said the best chance of finding romance was between the pages of one of their books, although they would say that, wouldn't they? They are shameless self-publicists even in anonymous online questionnaires, each and sixty-four per cent of them.
With the writers out of the way the Festival of Romance can move on to the thoughts of the public, and invites anyone, including yourself, gentle reader, to take part in the same discussion and see if we are that different from professional romantics. A week remains before polling is closed and the results stand, forever defining the attributes of the ideal partner, so time is not the only matter of utmost importance. 'The Festival of Romance is calling on the nation's women to let the novelists know what they think makes the perfect man,' says event organiser and novelist Kate Allan. 'This vital poll could change the way that romantic novels are written!' You heard the lady, Bewildered Hearts. If enough of you make Technology Literate an essential requirement of the perfect man perhaps we can at last see an internet blogger into the world of romantic heroism. Failing that we can still achieve the less ambitious aim of changing the way romantic novels are written.
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