The “book boyfriend” phenomenon seems to reflect strain in heterosexual dating dynamics: Men are from Mars, women are conducting emotional affairs with fictional astronauts. Photo / Getty Images
A “book boyfriend” - a literary hunk you pine for in real life - has been around for centuries. But today’s readers have taken this fantasy to a new level.
He’s respectful. He listens when she talks and remembers what she says. He would probably kill for her – and he would definitely die for her. Needless to say, he would not have to be begged to take out the trash.
He is what romance readers call a “book boyfriend”. On BookTok and Bookstagram – the thriving social media communities dominated by romance and fantasy readers – the term has become ubiquitous. “Book boyfriend” describes characters who seem to have stridden, galloped or brooded onto the page from somewhere in the recesses of the reader’s deepest desires. If you have ever closed your eyes and imagined waking up in Pemberley to a shirtless Fitzwilliam Darcy asking if you would do him the honour of accompanying him on a turn about the park, you could say that you’ve had a book boyfriend.
Simply put, a book boyfriend is a character you can’t stop thinking about – and longing for – beyond the page.
Conversations about book boyfriends tend to be as wry and playful as two protagonists flirting on a yacht off the coast of Italy. Readers use the term as shorthand to convey a particular reading experience. It does not describe imaginary friends. “We know what we read is fiction,” said Jeanette Moreno, a BookToker whose running list of top book boyfriends features 49 carefully selected names. “We’re not delusional.”
“When we read a romance book, and the main character is a billionaire who takes a woman on a date and flies her to France, we know that’s not real,” she said. “We don’t care that he’s a billionaire or that he buys her jewellery. We care that he remembered she doesn’t like pickles in her sandwich, and he takes her coffee to bed. It’s the little thoughtful things that really stick with us.”
Romance book sales continue to soar, bolstered in part by readers who pass around these lists of fictional men as if sharing the details of a particularly gentle dentist or a skilled massage therapist. Publishers market new romance books with the words, “Let me introduce you to your new book boyfriend.” The phenomenon seems to speak to a new, or more heightened, way that some readers are fulfilling their emotional needs through fiction. It also seems to reflect strain in heterosexual dating dynamics: men are from Mars, women are conducting emotional affairs with fictional astronauts.
“If you want to talk about what romance really is, it is a genre that tells us about how people want to live their lives,” said Marcela Di Blasi, an assistant professor in the Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies Department at Dartmouth who is working on a book about the politics of romantasy, the popular genre that combines romance and fantasy.
“People who don’t read romance or romantasy might hear the term ‘book boyfriend’ and come to the same conclusions that people came to when Madame Bovary came out,” she said. In Gustave Flaubert’s classic 1857 novel, Emma Bovary reads so many romance novels that she “became herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings,” slowly ruining her life by living as if she were a romantic heroine. But book boyfriends aren’t just an escape into fantasy, Di Blasi said. They give readers a blueprint for talking to their loved ones about how they want to be treated and how they don’t.
Consider Malakai, the romantic lead in the 2022 novel Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola. Malakai has a “lethal” smile, and he makes the protagonist laugh. He appreciates her mind and tells her, “I like me better when I’m with you.” Babalola said that hearing that her character has been heralded as a book boyfriend is “the biggest honour”. But she doesn’t see the man she wrote as an exercise in fantasy.
“I want people to come away thinking that there’s hope to find people like this in real life,” Babalola said. “The things that I give a male protagonist, they are not far-fetched things: It’s kindness, it’s tenderness, it’s seeing the woman as an individual and knowing her ambition.”
Are fictional men, with their jutting cheekbones, thick wallets and bottomless wells of empathy turning women off flawed-yet-corporeal men? Female romance readers sometimes struggle with the question. Some men feel that book boyfriends have set an unreasonable ideal. Moreno said she hears from men all the time who tell women readers, “It’s so hard for us because you compared us to the book characters that you read!” But are men really suffering from comparisons to their fictional counterparts?
Moreno says that in her actual dating life, few men do things as basic as offering to pay for coffee, holding a door open or texting her to ask if she got home safe. Reading about better men in novels, she said, “makes you think, ‘Wait – no, I do deserve better!’”
“Why do men get so frustrated about us having book boyfriends?” she wondered. “Is it just because they can’t step up?” Indeed, the real-life book boyfriend is not a contradiction in terms: on social media, a man who raises his girlfriend’s chin to kiss her gently on the head, or a man who reads in bed, is labelled a real-life book boyfriend. And plenty of real-life couples keep lists of book boyfriends, while also staying true to their real-life boyfriends and husbands.
Great book boyfriends who live in books may tell us about how we want to be loved. But they don’t offer a set of instructions that can or should be followed precisely in life. Peeta Mellark of the Hunger Games series is considered an iconic book boyfriend for his yearning heart and strategic mind – so committed is he to Katniss that his love only wavers when the Government injects him with a venomous mind-control substance. On the other hand, Rhysand from the mega-popular A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas is widely celebrated as an all-time great book boyfriend in part because he heals and protects protagonist Fayre. But he also sexually humiliates her and coerces her into spending time with him.
Of course, neither the fantastical nor the problematic book boyfriend is new. In 1848, a literary magazine reported that “New England States were visited by a distressing mental epidemic, passing under the name of the ‘Jane Eyre fever.’” Boarding schoolgirls and governesses were the most likely to be afflicted, the writer reported, as well as young men who, inspired by the book’s male protagonist, “began to swagger and swear in the presence of the gentler sex, and to allude darkly to events in their lives which excused impudence and profanity.” This was, presumably, a result of women and girls expressing attraction to a made-up character who kept his wife in an attic and who, the text tells the reader repeatedly, isn’t even handsome. Like today’s book boyfriends, Mr. Rochester’s impact seems to be a joint production of the writer’s deftness and the readers’ wild imaginations.
As in Jane Eyre, book boyfriends in the “dark romance” genre commit acts that would send real boyfriends to prison. “I think readers are very aware that there is a difference between a fictional man on the page written by usually a woman or femme, and an actual human man who has been shaped by society,” Di Blasi said of violent and controlling book boyfriends. “Having these characters is a way for a lot of readers to explore those things in a safe way.”
A more unique and recent trend, Di Blasi noted, is romance novels in which “men learn from their mistakes”. In books such as those by the writer Adriana Herrera, “they are accountable,” Di Blasi said. “They don’t wait to be educated by the women in their life.” This is quite a contrast to Jane Eyre who, 178 years ago, had to go crawling door-to-door begging for porridge and then nearly married her creepy cousin before Mr Rochester was changed enough for the two lovers to reconcile.
Recently, Babalola gave a talk about her books at a high school. A teenage girl raised her hand and said that she loved reading “Honey & Spice,” and confessed: “It made me not want to date these guys in high school.” If a guy wasn’t going to act like her best friend, be fun to hang out with and add value to her life, what was the point?
Babalola was happy to hear a teenager articulate that you don’t have to just accept whatever a man offers if it isn’t what you really want. “At the crux of it, I just want women to maintain their standards,” she said. “And here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s necessarily ‘high standards’ to want a man who’s kind, and loving, and tender.”
Diogo Riedi's grandmother taught him to make bread in a wood-fired oven in Brazil.