The Dating Ritual Put To The Test

I have been described as being someone who shoots straight from the hip.  I guess that’s an indirect way of saying I’m opinionated. 🙂  In certain subjects and areas, I guess that’s true.  I have for many years been a compulsive people watcher and that has a direct outcome of giving you very strong likes and dislikes about all sorts of categories regarding the human animal and his habits.

It was almost inevitable I would end up writing erotic romance.  I’d been watching the mating dance for years anyway.  Some of the antics we put ourselves through just for the sake of love and lust are hilarious, when it comes right down to it.  Some of them are downright hypocritical, but that’s just the darker side of human nature at work and that’s where the delicious drama comes into play.  Conflict is what makes a good story work.

Consider the dating ritual.  Whoever thought up the old “three dates before sex” thing?  Are you old enough to remember that?  I am.  It’s so ingrained in my system that I almost felt guilty if I fell into bed with a man I genuinely liked and trusted before the third date, despite the fact that I’d been ignoring it for at least a decade.

And did you know that women are physically as strong as men?  Pound of muscle for pound of muscle, they are.  They just don’t have as much muscle.  Give them the same amount of muscle, and they could push men around with as much force as men can push women around if they had a mind to.  When you keep that in mind, it really changes your perspective on the whole “weaker sex” thing.  Women have been proving for decades that they’re a whole lot tougher mentally.  If they’re just as strong physically, except for lacking a few pounds of muscle, and still manage to look so fabulously sleek and svelte, then what do we start tagging men in exchange for the “weaker sex” label?   Food for thought, huh?

It’s thoughts like these and my damned inability to keep my mouth shut that all goes into my novels these days.  Writing erotic romance is a great arena for playing around with themes like these, where you can arrange all sorts of situations with the genders and conflicts; blow everyone’s traditional expectations out of the water, shake them up and make them look at things a new way.  I love doing stuff like that.  Make characters sweat a little, and have to think about their lives all over again.

After all, we all have to re-examine ourselves and our lives all the time.  Why shouldn’t characters in books?

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