Are our Book Boyfriends Really Unhinged?

One thing about me: Oh, I’m going to write very unhinged men. One  thing about y’all: you’re going to love them. My characters are out here engaging in questionable “work” activities 😁, making wild ultimatums, acting out, then insisting on forgiveness and understanding. My readers response? The more unhinged, the higher he ranks we as a book boyfriend! I know this may sound like a familiar topic given my posts on Smoke and Demon and “Could You Live the Lives of My FMCs,” but this week we are going to talk about why we justify unhinged behavior and what is so alluring about it. Let’s look at a couple of different “unhinged” behaviors and see if we can find a deeper meaning to them. 

A couple of quick notes: 1) We do not AT ALL condone violent and/or abusive behavior. We are speaking about fiction and the lengths authors and readers go to to justify and even romanticize things that entice us in the fiction world but that may be problematic in real life. 2) My stories to date have featured heterosexual couples, and  the language of the post reflects that.

A common unhinged trait amongst our book boyfriends is the willingness to kill mfs for the women they love. The reasons vary,  but it’s usually along the lines of killing to protect or what they think is protection. We have seen scenarios where our book boyfriend will tell his woman that he will kill anyone who talks to her or even looks at her. Unhinged? Sure! But why do we also kind of find this behavior attractive? While murder is an over the top reaction, many of us interpret this as a man showing his woman that he loves and will protect her at all costs. He will do everything in his power to show her that, including unaliving someone (or several someones). The thought is appealing because many women want to be protected by their men, to know that their partners will do anything to establish and preserve their safety. There is just something alluring about a man who will move heaven and earth for his woman.

Another common unhinged theme for our book boyfriends is stalking. Time and time again, authors write “boy meets girl,” then all of a sudden, boy is sending lunch to work and flowers to her home. While these are both romantic gestures, girl never told boy where she worked or lived, so irl, it would be beyond creepy. In the book world, what it usually comes down to is that boy performed a background check because he has those resources at his immediate command. As readers and authors, we romanticize his behavior by casting it as he took initiative to find out where she lived and worked. In this narrative, if a man would do that for a complete stranger, imagine what he would do for the woman he loves. So, while maybe a bit extreme, what you see is a man who cares and again, will do everything in his power to prove it. 

Another type of unhinged behavior is seeing women as property, something to be owned and bartered with. I have been known to write my fair share of men who have had a woman living in their home with them as payment or leverage for the wrongdoings of another man. Now, typically in these situations, these MMCs are not the evil masterminds behind the situation coming to be, but they also did not do much complaining. They accept the women as payment. Ultimately, they end up engaging in relationships that we as authors and readers “ooh” and “ahh” over. In real life, we’d be wondering if the women suffered from Stockholm Syndrome. Still, kidnapping and forced proximity are popular tropes. What better way to see how a person lives and if you two are really compatible than by being forced to live together for a period of time? While completely unorthodox and  yes, unhinged, the outcome has the potential to far outweigh all the problematic behavior it took to get there. On a personal note, the feminist scholar in me struggled with my affection for the kidnapping and woman-as-payment tropes. I’ve accepted what I read as an escapist pleasure, though.  🤷🏽‍♀️ As I wrote to one reader who was grappling with what she considered as Dream’s “forced pregnancy” in Demon’s Dream, you can’t approach some of my work with your feminist lens as primary. Well, you can, but you’re pretty quickly going to be aggravated.

Even though we claim to love the unhinged nature of these behaviors, we do mental cartwheels and backflips to justify them and make them seem almost necessary. We put a positive spin on behavior and situations that are not, on the surface, positive. These men are just expressing their feelings in the best ways they know how. Most of our unhinged boyfriends have come of age resolving their problems with violence, so they perceive their reactions as normal and effective. Of course, I would love to know what y’all think: are these behaviors unhinged or can they be justified in positive ways? Let me know in the comments below and as always…

Blissful Reading!