~ By Dave Thome
I recently ran across this quote:
“If a man loves a woman’s soul, he’ll end up loving one woman, but if he loves a woman’s face, all the women in the world won’t satisfy him.”
It sounded good, but I kept wondering exactly why.
I started by examining my own experience. I’ve fallen in love three times—five if you include two of my own female characters. But I don’t think falling in love with characters who are essentially you counts.
My first love was a girl in high school. She was cute, but I suspect most guys wouldn’t describe her as sexy or hot like women from websites such as https://www.hdsexvideo.xxx/. Some people thought we were mismatched because I was on the Dean’s List and she wondered who this Dean guy was, but we talked and laughed a lot. She made me feel good.
Then I had a girlfriend in college. Kind of. Actually, she had a boyfriend—but it wasn’t me. She had held onto her high school crush and installed me as the workaday stand-in. She was cuter and smarter than my high school lady, but eventually I was the one asking what I was thinking.
But what did her soul have to do with it? I don’t remember thinking much about that.
I turned to the Internet, and my hasty and incomplete research introduced me to examples of sublime wisdom such as this quote from Aarti Khurana at Life Love Quotes and Sayings.com:
“Real men don’t fall in love with a woman’s body. You don’t need to have amazing curves or a flawless complexion to be defined as attractive. Your beauty is not a criteria for a man to fall in love with you. When a man loves you for your compassionate heart and your beautiful soul, then you will be the most beautiful woman on this planet just for him.”
There was more wisdom on the topic at this page, but an ad for plus-size women’s clothing blocked it out.
My research, such as it was, also led me to the profane, such as this gem at Brainy Quotes.com uttered by contemporary deep thinker Paris Hilton: “No matter what a woman looks like, if she’s confident, she’s sexy.”
Nonetheless, much wisdom can come from the profane, and for that I needed to look no further than my own romance stories. In San Fernando Dreams, Douglyss—who is adept in the deployment of a profane tongue, says, “We’re all a little weird, or got some bug up our ass, or some bullshit. And if you can’t find someone to put up with whatever the fuck it is, you might as well not even exist.” A few pages later, she realizes who that person is for her.
In Malibu Bride, Sushma is disagreeable, pushy and bossy—personality traits that often get her into hot water. Holt, though, loves her not in spite of those things, but because of those things. “I like it when she talks back,” he says. “It helps me keep my edge.”
Especially not The One.
DC (or David, as his mother calls him) Thome started out as a journalist and moved on to write twenty screenplays, including four that almost got made into movies, before turning to novels. He started writing romance novels because, “My wife and I are freelance writers, and when we were having a slow month, she announced she was going to write a short erotic romance and sell it to an online publisher. I thought that if she was man enough to do that, I should be,too. She tried to read one and because she couldn’t make herself finish it, decided she couldn’t write an erotic romance. I read the same book and realized that since no one had had sex by page 40 of my novel, it probably wasn’t ‘erotic.’” The novel turned into the Fast Lane trilogy.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dave.thome.5
Dave. Loved – Loved – you post. And your wife writing erotica, too funny. I said I didn’t write erotica because I thought BSDM was erotica. LOL. But I have some pretty erotic scenes in my books.
Glad to have made your acquaintance.
Sam
Dave,
You rock. And all three of your romance books in your series need to be made into a movie franchise!
Christine DeSmet, Fudge Shop Mystery Series (no erotica, but Belgian chocolate fudge helping the romance along)