Whenever I tell anyone that I’ve written a romantic comedy, I’ll get one of two responses. Women will generally say, “Aw”, and men will generally say, “Oh”. I didn’t realise it while I was writing, but men who write about love don’t tend to shout about it. Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and Fever Pitch are both books about love that went out of their way to present themselves as being about music and football respectively, to appeal to a male audience. Me? I’ve got a love heart on the fucking cover.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m far from the only man on the planet writing about falling hopelessly in and out of love. Mike Gayle and David Nicholls have been flying the flag for years with their bestselling novels. So, too, have authors like Nicholas Sparks, Richard Roper, Bobby Palmer and John Green, to name a few. The hard part isn’t just getting these books into the hands of men, but getting any books into their grasp at all. Just this year, a poll from YouGov found 66% of women have read at least one book in the last year, compared with just 53% of men. This disinclination for men to read starts at a young age. The National Literacy Trust published figures in 2022 showing that fewer boys than girls (45.6% versus 54.9%) enjoyed getting stuck into a book, with 76% of schools reporting boys didn’t do as well as girls in reading.
This attitude becomes even starker when we consider that globally, women are still far more likely than men to be illiterate. While literacy rates have improved for both genders, nearly two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women as a consequence of historical and systemic gender inequalities that limit women’s access to education. So, it’s not that men can’t read – in fact, they’re often granted greater access and opportunity than others – it’s simply that many choose not to. And when they do, they’re far more likely to read for information and utility rather than enjoyment.
Young men are increasingly obsessed with self-discipline and self-improvement, eschewing fiction in favour of self-help books like Atomic Habits and ancient Chinese military treatises. No, really. Thanks to its popularity among grindset influencers, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War regularly appears on Amazon bestseller lists. Men would literally rather read about military tactics written in 5th-century China than go to therapy.
Which is why now, more than ever, I think it’s important for men to be reading and writing about love. The extent to which 24/7 access to pornography or the ever-growing presence of influencers like Andrew Tate is to blame is up for debate, but what’s not is just how many young men are starting to become disenfranchised with romantic relationships. A 2023 Pew Research study found that 63% of men under 30 described themselves as single, compared with 34% of women in the same age bracket. Recent polling from Ipsos shows young men believe women prioritise attractiveness and financial status in partners, despite their female peers saying a sense of humour and kindness are more important. And while there are heaps of women authors writing poignantly and effectively about love, more men writing and reading about love isn’t just helpful, but necessary.
Men can (and should) learn a lot from reading a woman’s perspective on romance, but having grown up as a boy who constantly sought out models of positive masculinity in the world around me, I know how impactful it can be to hear that perspective from a man as well.
Love is not for the faint of heart. It requires courage and bravery and resilience – factors often associated with “being a man”, yet usually established as physical rather than emotional traits. What we need are more men willing to lead by example and show others that it’s okay to be emotionally vulnerable. You’ve all seen that photo of Jacob Elordi reading with a book tucked into his canvas trouser pocket. You’ve all seen the memes that came off the back of it, too. While it’s easy to make fun of any man for earnestly poring over a copy of bell hooks’ All About Love on the tube or wearing a T-shirt that says “Miranda July”, I’d much rather see men reading performatively than not at all.
Men, of course, have bigger problems than not reading novels. At school, boys are falling sharply behind and doing worse than girls in almost every subject. That educational underachievement, combined with the rise in incel culture and an influx of toxic male role models and online misogyny, doesn’t paint a pretty picture. I’m aware that telling boys to pick up a copy of One Day isn’t going to fix an institutional crisis, but even if it’s on a minuscule scale, I think it can help.
The writer James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” It’s all made up. Of course, it’s made up. But the emotions behind fiction – and the emotions a good book can set off inside you like little Catherine wheels of happiness, anger, and sadness – are extremely real.
“I’m aware that telling boys to pick up a copy of One Day isn’t going to fix an institutional crisis, but even if it’s on a minuscule scale, I think it can help”
It’s been proven that reading fiction can improve emotional intelligence and help cultivate empathy. Other studies have found a connection between reading fiction and enhanced social and cognitive abilities, which are considered essential for critical thinking. The brain is a muscle, just like any other organ, and reading is one of the best workouts for your imagination. While reading non-fiction can help you retain and recall information, reading fiction forces you to be imaginative, engaging your creative faculties as you become an active participant in the story you’re following. There’s room for you to breathe between the pages and fill in blanks in the narrative. Unlike scrolling mindlessly on your phone or even watching an arthouse film at the cinema, reading is unique in that it’s an active rather than a passive experience.
It’s that active engagement which makes fiction so powerful. It’s why Nora Ephron’s Heartburn helped me get through a bad break-up at university, even though I had nothing in common with the main character aside from a pummelled heart. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and it even gave me a whole new perspective on All The President’s Men (Ephron wrote her novel after discovering that her second husband, Carl Bernstein, the journalist who broke the Watergate Scandal, was cheating on her). To this day, Heartburn is a book I’ll press into the hands of any friend who has just been dumped.
As someone who’s written a high-concept romcom about falling in and out of love in your late twenties, I’ll admit it’s a little depressing to think that most men won’t even consider picking it up off the shelf because of its genre. I remember telling a literary agent I met at an event that I hoped I could convince men to read it; her words to me were: “Good fucking luck.”
Her words stuck with me – but thankfully, I’ve always believed in creating my own luck. Novels have always informed my views of the world: contemporary and otherwise. My ideas of romance were shaped just as much as a teenager by Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine as they were by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Because love is love. It’s universal. Timeless. And I think if you’re writing about something with honesty, and it’s coming from a place of emotional truth, then there’s no reason why someone reading it can’t relate to it, regardless of their gender or background. To quote the 1989 Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams: “If you build it, he will come.”
In a world where men are becoming increasingly distant and hostile to just about everyone around them, I think the power of fiction to bring people together – even if it’s shifting them nothing more than a few centimetres closer to being on the same page – shouldn’t be underestimated. Everyone falls in love. All I hope is that more men can fall in love with reading about it.
