Is It Romance?

After a year or so of exploring fiction writing, I've come to the conclusion that romance is the spiritual dimension of reproduction. I use the term spiritual because, when writing Arthurian romances, materialist stories are reductive in the extreme. Two knights love the same lady, they fight, one wins, he takes the lady to bed. No matter how you slice it, that's the way it goes.

This came as no surprise to me. Darwinian romance is an oxymoron. For Darwinians, a species is improved when mating partners are selected for genetic strength as demonstrated through fertility for the lady and strength for the knight. If you read the Arthurian Legends through an atheistic lens, that's what you get. Back in the 1980s, Arthurian analysis, criticism and fiction was dominated by that approach. Sir Gareth overcame the Knight of the Red Launds in order to have sexual access to Lady Lionesse. Ooh la la ... yawn.

Here, the lady binds her knight's wounds so that his genetic material can mix with hers and create robust offspring which will perpetuate their DNA as far into the future as possible. She smiles with the knowledge that he is in the top 4.372% of all possible mates in terms of strength, disease resistance and longevity.

You might as well have been reading about cattle. I have no idea what Arthurian analysis says these days. I couldn't stomach the reductive, feminist trash 40 years ago and I'm sure it's only gotten worse. The movies and television shows certainly have.

Getting back to romance, it's become clear from writing that it's based in biological realities. Women are smaller, softer and weaker than men. They are vulnerable when pregnant and nursing. As Jordan Peterson has pointed out many times, their vulnerability and the vulnerability of their infants makes them much more sensitive to threats and as a consequence they have much higher levels of anxiety and neuroticism than men.

In a medieval world, those risks are front and center in any woman's life. They need protection and that can only come from a man. Their reproductive role also drives them to seek a committed man, one who won't wander off to other women. Finally, their anxiety drives them to crave demonstrations of affection. I've heard this manifested in talks given by women over and over and over again. You can see it aplenty if you watch YouTube channels that focus on frustrated, single, young women who struggle to find a man who will "treat them right."

All of that reveals the genius of the Arthurian romances. They are classics because they speak to this truth. A knight must choose between the atheist's route and simply dominating the lady as a stallion dominates a mare or allowing his spiritual nature to control his animal passions. In that case, he must prove to the lady that he will protect, provide and cherish her to the exclusion of all other women. That is romance. The ladies are the motivating forces in the stories while the knights are the active forces.

On the flip side, the women must attract and encourage the men. Given the self-denial required on the part of the men, the payoff in terms of the Horizontal Monkey Dance and the pleasure of having the lady by his side has got to outweigh the cost of his sacrifices. That manifests itself in allure, charm and praise. It's the Arthurian version of the three things men want from a woman: respect, admiration and sex. That, too, is romance.

Again, the legends are classics because they speak to truths of the human condition.

A year ago, using an earlier version of ChatGPT, the AI would constantly try to drag the story into a feminist framework and I would argue with it. While annoying, these arguments are what revealed what I've described above. When AI went all boss-babe on me, it utterly ruined the stories. Our discussions showed how and why that happened. The ass-kicking girls of modern movies are biological lies and you can't write decent or even indecent fiction based on lies.

The earlier version of ChatGPT destroyed stories of romance because it denied the biological realities upon which romance is based.

The truth of our natures, our sexual dimorphism, can't help but drive tales of romance in very particular directions.