Why are women attracted to books with titles such as The Texas Billionaire's Pregnant Bride and The Nurse's Brooding Boss? It's because they portray the embodiment of female desires, evolved over centuries, according to two Canadian researchers who analysed more than 15,000 Harlequin romance novels to see if they bore out evolutionary psychology.
Theorising that mating instincts, developed over thousands of years, mean that women want a wealthy, fit, fertile, committed man, the researchers speculated that titles published by Harlequin – the owner of Mills & Boon – would be heavy on words such as baby, father and paternity; wealth, tycoon and billionaire; marriage, engagement and bride; and handsome, attractive and athletic.
Analysing a total of 15,019 books, Anthony Cox from the Centre for Psychology and Computing in Dartmouth, Canada and Maryanne Fisher from the department of psychology at St Mary's University in Nova Scotia found that "love" was the most frequently used word in Harlequin romance novel titles (occuring 840 times), followed by "bride" (835), "baby" (696), "man" (672) and "marriage" (612). Other frequently used words included "cowboy" (314), "night" (340) and "nurse" (224). Delving deeper, into the most popular professions in the romance books, they found that "doctor" topped this count with 388 making it into titles, followed by "cowboy" (314), "nurse" (224) and "boss" (142). "Prince", "rancher", "knight", "king", "bodyguard", "sheriff", "pirate" and "midwife" all came in behind.
"The 20 most frequent words clearly suggest long-term commitment and reproduction are important to readers. We did not find words related to resources or physical attractiveness within this list, but did find that the occupations of doctor and cowboy were included," the pair reported, in a paper for the Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology. "Many of the occupations were centred around high incomes (eg surgeon), or positions that demand physical fitness (eg cowboy). There were also professions related to protection (eg sheriff) that may be related to physical fitness because of the highly physical nature of these professions."
Cox and Fisher concluded that Harlequin romance novel titles were "congruent with women's sex-specific mating strategies, which is surmised to be the reason for their continued international success".
Bestselling Mills & Boon author Sharon Kendrick was unsurprised. "[Their] research into book titles shows that women gravitate towards ones which depict a loyal, fit, rich and sexy bloke. Funny, that! That would be as opposed to a commitment-phobe wastrel who plays around?" she said, suggesting a possible future title of Doctor Heartbreak and the Virgin Researcher. "It's all about buzz words," she added.
Penny Jordan, author of more than 170 novels for Mills & Boon, agreed. "The potential of commitment forever in a romance aligns with a bedrock instinctive 'feeling' within women that a man who is male and powerful enough to be desired by many women (ie not a stalker type) and who wants to commit himself exclusively, is the gold standard when it comes to the foundations for couple happiness," she said. "With such a man and his commitment a woman may feel 'safe' to allow herself the potential vulnerability that comes with having children who will also be 'vulnerable' until they are strong enough to support themselves."