Why men should read romance novels.

A couple on a cruise for the first time signs up for a lecture on how to have a better sex life. They think it will be cute and intimate, data based and professionally led. It ends up being a cringey two hours of being prompted to share personal details with total strangers.

The couple had a good idea--revamp their private life after being married for fifteen years. But they could have skipped the room full of forty-five year olds chuckling at the word 'penis' in favor of something far simpler. Reading romance novels together.

Romance sales make up roughly 25% of fiction sold in the U.S. An estimated 29M people regularly read romance novels. Of those, ~85% are women. Fans span all ages but half are under the age of 34. Considering the data, it's safe to say that women are connecting with these stories.

Billionaire Boss? Secret Baby? Mafia? Highland Lord? For most women, the characters--their jobs, the meet cute, the time period--don't matter at all. In fact, those details are so arbitrary that M/M romance (two male characters) is booming. Yet 87% of buyers are straight women.

All romance novels do is zoom in on 300 pages worth of two people falling in love, struggling to stay together, and then a happily ever after guarantee. It's comforting in its predictability. And the sexual dynamics open up a world of language around intimacy for all readers.

Throughout the heroes communicate their physical and emotional needs. As The Bromance Bookclub quote goes "Hey, if there's problems inside the bedroom, they usually start outside the bedroom." And this jives with what sex educators like Emily Nagorski say.

Studies have shown that over 98% of men watch porn. But there's a negative correlation between watching porn and a man's judged sexual performance. Why? Researchers found that men created the porn. It was based on male desires. So they didn't learn how to satisfy women from it.

By contrast, the vast majority of romance writers are women. Their work presents a women-centric, women-owned version of pornography. One that is love driven. Removing the precise details around characters and plot, novels are a guide to the female psyche. Men who communicate.

The sexual descriptions are also essentially diagrams to female anatomy that traditional pornography doesn't come close to trying to elucidate. Experts agree, these novels are actually very feminist in that the genre is female pleasure forward. So they're great training material!

Finally, romance novels come in all flavors--vanilla to high kink. Jointly reading novels that have these different dynamics is an excellent way to safely explore whether a kink might interest you and opens up the lines of communication with a partner. ENJOY!