The Rulebook of Romance

Every single society has a book of rules when it comes to romances. Some are full of guidelines others have strong prescriptions for crossing their lines, most land in the messy middle-ground.

When one thinks about dating and romance thoughts often flow to either the progression or the events that come from that progression. It may be the quiet dates, long walks on the beach, and anything else that forms the romance. Very rarely does one think about the way the game is played or the rules that control the game. Rules may flow from hard boundaries that cannot be crossed to guidelines that most couples flaunt at the earliest convenience. The way these interact with each other and the way the players interact with the rules can reveal more about the culture than one would expect. Add in the fact that rules end up building out how the game is played and the rule book to love becomes one of the most important parts of the romance system of any world, and what we will be going over this week.

To start decide what game it is that one is playing. I have decided it will be some kind of card game. What kind of card game is willfully nebulous. I have to end up with an example that is both universal and yet specific enough. That said, it also is a game without clear stages, and without a clear direction of progression. Regardless of whatever game you decide to base there needs to be both the ability for the two players to work together and against each other. As testing your partner is something that needs to be done while playing the game. Thus pick your game genre first and then from there develop the rules. This will help to ensure that the rules fit the way the romance ends up working in the world, and thus the stories created in it.

Regardless of the type of game, there will be two different types of rules: guidelines and rules. Guidelines are less clear, and often less-enforceable. Meaning guidelines are often bent, crossed or broken, with little to no real consequences for the players either individually or collectively. Guidelines are often what end up defining stages of relationships. Providing an outline of what to do during that stage of the relationship. Rules on the other hand are much more clear cut and often very strongly enforced. They are used to police the players, the game, and ensure outcomes for society. Rules can sometimes force players to take actions, or even enter into stages of the relationship they would rather not enter into. Thus treat guidelines as a way of setting expectations and rules as a way of setting limits to the game and thus the relationship.

It’s important to realize that players also set their own rules and guidelines. Sometimes they will be wise enough to mention or at least allude to their set of rules and guidelines. However often the players won’t realize they have, or are using a set of rules and guidelines of their own creation. More than a few relationships have fallen apart because one player, or the other, has run a foul of one or more of the rules the other player has set; often without either player realizing those rules were in play.

With either rules or guidelines figuring out how society enforces them is the first job for the worldbuilder to tackle. Enforcing these rules and guidelines will set the tone for the entirety of the relationships. If there are many rules, and they are strictly held than players will be more cautious; not wanting to suffer the consequences of breaking a rule. If some rules get downgraded to be guidelines that frees up options for the players to make more moves. The other trend to note is that players will be less interested in playing if there are too many rules or guidelines. As when there is such a complicated system to work though players will worry about hitting a rule they didn’t know existed.

Society, as it is both board and mediator, untimely is what controls the rules and how they get enforced. Because of this the worldbuilder will need to understand how society uses these rules and guidelines to influence the romance. Are the rules and guidelines uneven or skewed one direction or the other? No matter how many rules or guidelines there are it’s important to understand how the enforcement is being handled. Is it primarily the player’s families that will be handling it? Are there wider social or legal punishments that get dealt out to players? Each of the possible answers will shape the way people interact with each other and the game that is romance.

Which brings us to the question: How does the game get played?

This is where the worldbuilder needs to formalize things. Like most things worldbuilding this needs to be centered on the systems and the structures. Details will be left for the individual worlds, yet any worldbuilder needs to know how the players can act, and how the third parties can act. Are there rules driving what actions, and how many actions one can make? Do the rules force a one than the other system where the two players alternate doing things or something else? This is the other thing that rules and guidelines do define the game in detail.

Is it a slow game where each move needs to be calculated and planned out properly? Is it a fast paced game of passion, where each move doesn’t matter as much as the reception to the moves? Either direction will change how the culture will experience, and thus view, romance. This will in it’s own right change the way the culture functions. As romance builds families, and families build societies, thus understanding romance will help understand the culture.

The other realization of power is that romance sets the tone and is set by the tone of intersexual relationships.

Get your mind out of the bedroom.

Yes getting couples in there is the goal of romance, however the general intersexual ecosystem will be influenced by romance, and it’s rules. This in generally has two segments pre-romance and post-romance. Pre-romance often has more pitfalls and issues. As most societies have some rules surrounding how the game can start, often with an understanding that a good number of romances will not follow those rules. This can be mitigated by society though two camps. Enforcing the formalization of the start of romance, and segregation of the players. This is where the fences I outlined last week come into play. Society will build strong fences to keep the two from starting the romance. This can echo with men and women not currently in romances having their interactions scrutinized by society. This often requires a lot of overhead by society, and can be worn down by the passions of youth. Thus a society with more pre-romance policing will be, or become a more, proactive society as setting and maintaining the pre-romnace intersexual playing field in the state it wants is a very proactive measure. Which will then roll back though the romance, and eventually spread everywhere else.

More importantly is the post-romance relationship. I have noticed, perhaps due to the “and then they lived happily every after” clause at the end of many a romance story, that a lot of storytellers and worldbuilders will trend to ignore the state after the romance has run its course. Now for some worlds this may not be an issue. If a species has a very reptilian view on procreation, perhaps taking off after the sea turtles, where there’s courtship, mating, then the children are abandoned to whatever fate becomes of them worrying about that post mating portion of the romance will be irrelevant. The inverse is also true, if the family becomes the most important part of society post romance may either not exist, as marriage is seen as the final, continuous form of romance rather than finishing the game and moving on into a different state. While the functions of married life will be saved for our final installment this month, the rules of romance will set the tone.

Which is a long winded way of saying there’s a lot more connected to romance, and everything else that what first may seem. One could argue that everything in society connects to it directly. Perhaps arguments best left for another time. In short understand the rules for romance and you’ll understand the core of a society’s rules in general.

With the foreshadowing out of the way what would this look like in the notebook? I break it into two parts, a briefing with the core ‘ideals’ of the rule book. Then a list of the most important rules and guidelines. This split works in two fronts the briefing surmises what I should be building towards, the most important rules is admitting that not every rule can be built at once. Thus a top three or five that gets the core of the rule book settled so that later worldbuilding can add or amend those rules. As everything in worldbuilding cascades to everything else in worldbuilding.

Thus for our example college the notes look something like this:

This system is meant to be a more formalized, and more community centered dating market where couples form less out of personal desires or feelings and more out of community pressures. This ‘romance reactor’ enforces a more traditional form of dating onto everyone within it. Thus while it is still clearly a modern system it has lots more trappings of Edwardian or Victorian era novels. The core rules are:

• Men must make the moves. Women are forbidden from engaging first, or more frequently. They can advise and suggest but he has to make the moves.
• Women are in charge of announcing the relationship. Not announcing a relationship is a grave error.
• Both parties will be expected to show up to social events together, and stay together the entire time.

Expanding on this rule book is an exercise I’ll leave to the reader. Suffice it to say the more in depth and detail one goes in this the better off they will be when it comes to writing any romances into their stories.

The last point worth mentioning is that the rule book shouldn’t be a static object. As time goes on the rules will change with the world and with society. New technology out pacing practices, the costs of keeping rules enforced out weighing the benefits, or simply changing of opinions on how things should be done. If one has a romance per generation, the rules and how they are enforced should change with, or because of, the times. Thus for those of us writing across history don’t let the rule book gather too much dust.

Thus we reach the end of the discussion on the rules of love. No matter if they are hard boundaries or softer guidelines the systems that govern romances will impact not only the romances, and the stories that come from those romances, but the society they all reside in. No matter if the rules are mostly guidelines or if they are iron clad they will not only set the tone but also give a path for characters, to follow. Let the Rulebook of romance be the silent, yet felt, part of your worlds, and in the romance stories told with in them.