Ease Yourself Into MMF Romances – Part III
How To Read Your First MMF Romance
This is Part Three of a Series
Part 1: Ménages Categorized
Part 2: How can MMF be romantic?
Part 3: How To Read Your First MMF Romance
Part 4: Where To Find Your MMF Romances
Part 5: Narrow Down Your List of Potential MMF Novels
Part 6: Keeping Track
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So, figure you’re ready to delve into the world of MMF romance? Let’s go.
You’ll need to buy an MMF Romance
Where to go to get your first MMF romance, who the best authors are, and how to tell them apart — even how to tell who writes more MM in their MMF than other MMF writers…that’s the subject of the next post, so help is on the way.
Eventually, though, you will have to just pick a title and buy it. You simply start somewhere.
How you read your first MMF will help you ease into the genre as a whole and help you enjoy it from the get-go.
Have No Expectations than to be thrilled like any other erotic romance.
When you read your first MMF romance, don’t come at it with huge expectations that it will somehow be different from other erotic romances.
It won’t.
MMF romances are erotic romances first and foremost. Any professional romance author putting MMF romances out there under her own name will be ensuring those stories deliver on the romance storyline in spades. So you should read the book expecting to be moved emotionally just as you are with any other romance novel you read. Nothing more or less.
Oh yes, and you will get to read some very hot sex, too, so…
Glide over the bumpy bits…for now.
This is your first MMF and you’re hesitant about the MM stuff, so when you hit a sex scene with MM sex acts in it, try reading it straight through, but if you find yourself recoiling at all — and it might happen — then glide over the sections that are making you blink until you get to calmer water again, then pick up steam again and carry on.
Whatever you do, don’t toss the book as useless, just yet. You’re acclimatizing yourself to a whole new genre and way of thinking. So ease yourself past the tight spot and move on.
Enjoy the romantic side of male on male to the fullest.
Do, however, revel in the romantic conflict and emotional side of the male/male romance within the menage. There won’t be anything icky in that, and you’ll get all the same emotional tension and romantic impact that you do from the male/female relationships. Enjoy the novel experience, experiment with the delight it brings you. And don’t feel guilty about it. We (all romance readers) adore this stuff. You can, too. Hell, it’s why we read romance novels! MMF novels gives it to us three times over.
Meantime, check out gay photography.
If you really want to get the hang of MMF novels, slots-tabs-and-all…if you really want to understand their full power to arouse, then cruise some of the better quality gay photography sites on-line. I’m not talking about the pornography sites, but the artistic photography sites, where really sexy men are photographed together in various poses. A few minutes on those sites and you start to understand the sensuality of two men together…
Try Bent Boy’s Place, as a jumping off point. But be warned: there are nude men, solo and in groups, all over the site.
(photo courtesy of Bent Boy’s Place)
Later books, try dipping into the slots and tabs scenes more deeply.
Once you’ve passed the major milestone of your first MMF book, and you haven’t melted into a pile of sticky goo (congratulations!), then immediately acquire a second MMF title, and a third, and a fourth….
Only, with these stories, don’t glide over the bumpy bits so much. Start reading the scenes straight through and see if you’ve acclimatized, yet. I think, with all the review reading you’ll be doing, and the mind-broadening you’ll be going through, you’ll surprise yourself.
You may even like what you read.
Who knows, you may enjoy what you read very much. Thousands of women enjoy this stuff…a lot. You have the potential to enjoy it too, or you would not be reading this series of posts in the first place.
Try authors who explore MM side of MMF more thoroughly.
The final phase is to try reading authors who develop the MM side of MMF romances more thoroughly than others. They don’t just give the MM side of the romance a glancing nod and single scene. They dive right into the sex scenes and MM romance and give them as many pages (if not more) than the MF sides of the menage.
When you think you’re ready, give one of these authors/stories a try, for these are romances with their romantic potential fully developed and at its peak of power and intensity. In the right author’s hands, they make rivetting reading.
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Next:
Where To Find Your MMF Romances
More resources:
Additional Articles:
MM and MMF – Let’s Try Again. Why Do Women Like Men Who Like Men?
The Heroes in MMF Romance Don’t Need Classification
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For a great mm romance I recommend the Cut & Run series by Madeleine Urban, Abigail Roux
Thanks for the recommendation, Donna.
t.