The mystery of the other

I don’t read Christian romance novels as such these days, though have read plenty in my time. For a while these all seemed to involve a wagon-train journey across the frontier of America (anyone else know who Clark Davis is?), then I read some by Gilbert Morris, and I appreciated his novels because they all featured tall, competent women (rather than the tiny, physically delicate sort with large, violet eyes), and the men who liked them and could see deeper than skin to still treat them as women, but who really were the equivalent of James Bond for heroics. It's George MacDonald novels that I really got into, because they were more complex and less blatantly romantic (you never knew quite what you were going to get in terms of theology however), but the truth is that the hero always emerged with a compelling strength of character. Anyway I believe I’ve linked in the past to, and we've probably all read, posts/articles about the parallels drawn between romance novels and pornography, but this article was still worth a read, and what I thought was particularly interesting in it was this paragraph:

And in both cases, what the “market” wants is sameness. Men want the illusion of women who look just like women but are, in terms of sexual response, just like men. Women want the illusion of men who are “real” men, but, in terms of a concept of romance, are just like women. In both artificial eros and artificial romance, there is the love of the self, not the mystery of the other.

I think one of the consequences of growing up without a father (or men in the house) is that I actually have something of an overdose of the "mystery of the other". The opposite sex "thing" gets compounded by the absence thing and I get so overawed (if that's even what it is, maybe mystified is more like it) in situations of attraction, it's incapacitating. But, ah, where am I headed with this? ... Stop, Ali, stop!