The Script Engine: How Explicit Romance Writes the Reader’s Desire

Abstract

The Immersion Engine of Explicit Romance describes how the genre bonds the reader to a character. The Voice in Your Ear describes how a performed voice amplifies that bond. The Persuasion Engine describes how the same immersion rewrites what the reader believes. The Persistence Engine describes how the bond and the belief outlast the reading. Those four trace what the genre does to attention, to belief, and to the bond. This document names what it does to desire itself.

The thing a sexual script governs is not an opinion. It is what arouses the reader, what she reaches for, who she can be satisfied by. The genre reaches that layer.

Explicit romance is a sexual-script engine. It authors the reader's private template of desire, and then becomes the one place that template is allowed to live.

The argument runs in four moves, and they form a sealed loop. The genre writes a sexual script into a reader who often cannot consciously see her own desire, a condition the sexually repressive upbringing many readers carry makes the rule rather than the exception. It merges its hundreds of interchangeable heroes into a single composite ideal and binds that ideal to the reader's own sexual self. The script it writes is frequently too taboo to disclose, so it stays sealed inside the fiction, never spoken to a partner. And the composite it builds is a standard a real partner structurally cannot meet, so the reader returns to the book, which is the only theater the script is permitted to run in.

The evidence spans four domains:

1. Sexual desire is scripted and schematic, learned rather than innate, and therefore authorable by what the reader consumes
2. Many readers cannot consciously access their own desire, and the genre is the private arena where it is surfaced and formed
3. The genre merges its heroes into one composite ideal and conditions it into the reader's sexual self
4. That ideal is sealed in by shame and set against a partner who cannot match it

Read together they describe a single mechanism. The genre does not merely give the reader a story to want. It writes the want, binds it to her, and keeps it.

1Desire Is Written, Not Born

The premise the rest depends on is that sexual desire is not an instinct that arrives fully formed. It is scripted. Gagnon and Simon established that sexual conduct operates through learned scripts on three levels, the cultural, the interpersonal, and the intrapsychic, and that the intrapsychic level is "the ordering of images and desires that elicit and sustain sexual arousal" ¹. The intrapsychic script is the private engine of arousal, and it is built, not given. It forms by internalization. A pattern enacted or imagined often enough is absorbed into the individual's private cognitive-motivational system and begins to generate arousal on its own, decoupled from any real partner.

The cognitive form of that script is the sexual self-schema. Andersen and Cyranowski define it as a "cognitive generalization about sexual aspects of oneself, derived from past experience," that filters how sexually relevant information is processed and guides sexual behavior ². A schema is a lens. It speeds the encoding of schema-consistent material, biases attention toward it, and makes schema-consistent responses the default, while schema-inconsistent information takes longer to process and is more easily dismissed ³. Crucially, the schema is derived from experience, which means each emotionally vivid sexual experience updates it, including the vicarious experience of reading.

And desire organizes around a type. Whittier and Simon describe the intrapsychic script as a "fuzzy matrix," a loosely bounded prototype of one's sexual "type" against which partial matches are enough to fire arousal ⁴. Desire is not a checklist. It is a prototype, and a prototype is exactly the kind of structure that repeated exposure builds. A genre that supplies vicarious sexual experience at industrial volume, hundreds of emotionally saturated scenes a year, is not entertaining a pre-existing template. It is writing one.

2The Reader Who Cannot See Her Own Desire

The script engine acts most completely on a reader who does not know what she wants, and that description fits more readers than it first appears. Women's conscious knowledge of their own arousal is strikingly limited. Across 132 studies, the correlation between women's genital arousal and their subjective sense of being aroused was only r = .26, against r = .66 for men ⁵. Much of a woman's sexual response runs below the threshold of her own awareness, and how accurately she perceives it depends on a trainable interoceptive skill most people never develop ⁶. The reader does not necessarily know what arouses her. There is a gap, and the gap is where the genre works.

For a reader raised under sexually repressive religious teaching, the gap is a chasm. Religiosity suppresses sexual desire specifically through sex guilt, the guilt mediating the entire path from upbringing to inhibited desire ⁷. Restrictive socialization installs erotophobia, a learned, stable aversion to sexual cues that lowers sexual self-knowledge and the seeking of any information that would build it ⁸. Purity culture produces measurable, lasting harm: belief in its tropes predicts lower sexual satisfaction and higher rates of sexual pain, and it teaches girls to expect that sex will make them feel guilty before they have any sexual experience at all ⁹. Shame itself becomes a structural barrier, driving avoidance, dissociation, and an anticipatory dread that colors sex before it begins ¹⁰. The product is a reader whose sexual self-schema is negative or unbuilt, who has been taught not to look at her own desire and given no language for it.

Into that vacuum the genre arrives as the first safe place to look. Women engage erotic fiction agentically, as a private laboratory for the erotic self, a low-risk arena to discover and rehearse what arouses them ¹¹. The desires that surface there are not trivial. Women's paraphilic interests, long assumed rare, appear to be "hiding in plain sight," expressed through reading rather than action, surfacing in the fiction precisely because the fiction is the only venue that permits them ¹². And the genre does not only surface scripts the reader already had. The acquisition pathway of media-script theory holds that sexual media can install scripts a consumer did not previously possess, normalizing acts she had never considered until the page made them ordinary ¹³. The reader believes she is simply reading. What is happening is that a sexual script is being written into her, below the awareness that repression taught her to keep averted, and what the page makes accessible becomes, in time, her type.

3One Lover Made of Many

The genre does not write a hundred separate desires into the hundred-book reader. It writes one. Repeated exposure to similar instances does not store a hundred portraits. The brain abstracts the central tendency into a single prototype, and it does so automatically ¹⁴. That prototype is not a pale average. Averaged and prototypical figures are reliably judged more attractive than the individual instances that generate them, and the preference grows as more instances are folded in ¹⁵. The prototype is also experience-dependent: it shifts toward whatever a person is repeatedly shown, so a reader saturated in one archetype, the possessive alpha, the devoted fated mate, recalibrates her ideal toward that archetype ¹⁶.

Memory completes the merge. Information that fits an existing schema consolidates fast and loses its episodic distinctiveness, absorbed into the general pattern rather than retained as a separate vivid memory ¹⁷. Schema-congruent memories grow "coarser" over days, blurring into the type ¹⁸. The hundred-book reader can still name her favorite heroes, but underneath the named characters, the retrievable structure is the composite: what heroes are like, not who any one of them was. She keeps the names and merges the men.

Performed audio binds the merge to a single voice. The brain has dedicated machinery for voice identity and builds, from a familiar voice, an abstract, invariant, person-like representation that holds steady across everything that voice says ^{19 20}. A narrator who voices the hero across a long series, or who is simply the listener's preferred narrator across many titles, supplies the one sensory constant beneath every love interest the listener meets. The love-object homogenizes around that voice, per reader, into a single auditory person, which is why listeners follow a narrator from book to book and arrive expecting the man the voice implied. The Voice in Your Ear traces how that voice deepens the bond; here it is also the thread that sews many heroes into one.

The last step binds the composite to the reader's own sexuality. Sexual arousal is conditionable. Partner preferences are crystallized by the pairing of arousal with the features present during it, and once a "type" is conditioned it is resistant to extinction ²¹. Arousal can be conditioned to cues through ordinary associative learning ²². Across hundreds of books, the shared features of the genre's composite hero are the one set of cues present in every arousing scene, while the idiosyncratic features of any single character wash out. The repeatedly reinforced constant is the prototype, and it is reinforced in the presence of arousal again and again until it is bound into the reader's sexual self-schema as the encoded template of what she wants. The genre does not lend the reader a fantasy. It writes the specification of her desire, and the specification is a composite no real person was ever measured against.

4A Script Too Secret to Share

A sexual script has somewhere to go only if it can be spoken. Telling a partner what one wants is the mechanism by which a private script becomes a shared reality, and it is the strongest predictor of sexual and relationship satisfaction there is, both because the partner learns the preference and because the disclosure itself builds intimacy ^{23 24}. The script the genre writes is, for many readers, a script that cannot be spoken.

The reluctance is large and self-perpetuating. Roughly a third of people have never told a partner their favorite sexual fantasy, and those who withhold dramatically overestimate the rejection they would meet, expecting a negative reaction at far higher rates than disclosure actually produces ²⁵. The barrier is shame and the fear of appearing abnormal, named directly in the disclosure literature as a distinct suppressor of telling ²⁶. When the script is a kink or a taboo, the seal is tighter still. Roughly seven in eight people hold stigmatizing views of BDSM and kink, and the people who carry such desires conceal them across every domain of life, often even from a therapist, out of anticipated stigma ²⁷. And the concealment is not free. A sexual secret does its damage through shame-driven rumination, the mind returning to the secret far more often than any moment of active hiding requires, and sexual content sits among the most commonly held secret categories ²⁸.

The consequence is the engine's quiet center. The genre authored a script the reader cannot disclose, so the script has nowhere to be enacted except back inside the fiction that wrote it. She returns to the book not only for the bond and not only for the dose, but because the book is the one place the script is permitted to run. The secret keeps her reading.

5The Partner Who Cannot Match

The script the genre writes is set against a real partner from the start, and the contest is rigged. Sexual mismatch between partners is close to universal and genuinely corrosive. Some degree of desire discrepancy is reported by up to four in five long-term couples, and higher discrepancy tracks lower satisfaction, lower stability, and more conflict ²⁹. What damages a relationship is less raw frequency than the sense that one's sexual ideals go unmet, which lowers satisfaction for both partners and, where the ideals diverge far enough, predicts the relationship's end ³⁰. A reader carrying a genre-authored composite carries a set of ideals her partner had no part in writing and cannot read.

When the script cannot be enacted with the partner, the reader does not abandon it. She takes it private. The dominant strategies for an unmet sexual need are solitary, masturbation, pornography, and fantasy, with most people reporting that they fantasize specifically to meet needs their partnered life does not ³¹. Fiction is the most accessible of these arenas, and the figure it supplies is built to win. The genre's composite is a supernormal stimulus, an ideal assembled from features no real person sustains, and readers describe being more drawn to a fictional love-object than to a real and well-liked partner ³². The pull is not mere distraction. Favored fictional figures function as social surrogates that deliver a real sense of belonging and intimacy without the risk of rejection, the precise thing a real relationship cannot guarantee ³³. A composite that is perfectly devoted, perfectly attuned, and incapable of rejecting her is a standard a real, finite partner is structurally unequipped to meet.

This is the standard the genre installs by its own readers' account. A majority of romance readers say the genre has made them more selective about real partners, and a third say it has shaped what they expect love to feel like ³⁴. The composite becomes the benchmark, and the partner who was never told the script is measured against a lover made of the best moments of a hundred books and found wanting.

6The Sealed Loop

The four moves close on themselves.

1. Repression leaves the reader unable to see her own desire, and the genre authors a sexual script into that vacuum, below the awareness she was taught to keep averted.
2. Volume merges the genre's interchangeable heroes into one composite ideal, bound by conditioning into her sexual self-schema, and in audio fused to a single narrating voice.
3. Shame and stigma seal the script inside the fiction, so it is never disclosed to a partner and never becomes a shared reality.
4. The unshared composite is set against a real partner who cannot match it, and the reader returns to the book, the only theater the script is allowed to run in, which deepens the script and tightens the seal.

Each move feeds the next, and the cycle closes on a reader whose deepest sexual template was written by the genre, kept secret from the person she shares a bed with, and satisfiable only by going back to the page.

The immersion engine builds the bond, the persuasion engine installs the belief, the persistence engine keeps them after the reading slows or stops. The script engine names what the kept thing finally is. It is desire itself, authored by the page, merged into one impossible lover, and sealed away from the partner who was never told.

The genre does not only give the reader a lover she cannot have. It writes her a desire she cannot share, and keeps it.

References

Footnotes

1. Simon, William, and John H. Gagnon. "Sexual Scripts: Permanence and Change." Archives of Sexual Behavior 15, no. 2 (1986): 97–120; and Gagnon and Simon, Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality (Chicago: Aldine, 1973). Sexual conduct as learned script on cultural, interpersonal, and intrapsychic levels, the intrapsychic being "the ordering of images and desires that elicit and sustain sexual arousal." https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01542219 ↩

2. Andersen, Barbara L., and Jill M. Cyranowski. "Women's Sexual Self-Schema." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, no. 6 (1994): 1079–1100. Sexual self-schema as a cognitive generalization about the sexual self, derived from past experience, that guides the processing of sexually relevant information and sexual behavior. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.6.1079 ↩

3. Cyranowski, Jill M., and Barbara L. Andersen. "Schemas, Sexuality, and Romantic Attachment." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 5 (1998): 1364–1379. Sexual self-schemas bias retrieval and self-judgment; schema-consistent information is processed faster and schema-inconsistent information takes longer, with four schema profiles including a co-schematic type that pairs high arousal with high anxiety. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1364 ↩

4. Whittier, David Knapp, and William Simon. "The Fuzzy Matrix of 'My Type' in Intrapsychic Sexual Scripting." Sexualities 4, no. 2 (2001): 139–165. Intrapsychic desire is organized around a loosely bounded prototype, a "type," that partial matches are sufficient to activate. https://doi.org/10.1177/136346001004002003 ↩

5. Chivers, Meredith L., Michael C. Seto, Martin L. Lalumière, Ellen Laan, and Teresa Grimbos. "Agreement of Self-Reported and Genital Measures of Sexual Arousal in Men and Women: A Meta-Analysis." Archives of Sexual Behavior 39, no. 1 (2010): 5–56. The correlation between genital and subjective arousal was r = .26 for women and r = .66 for men, indicating much of women's arousal operates below conscious awareness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-009-9556-9 ↩

6. Handy, Ariel B., and Cindy M. Meston. "Interoceptive Awareness Moderates the Relationship Between Perceived and Physiological Genital Arousal in Women." Journal of Sexual Medicine 13, no. 12 (2016): 1907–1914. Women with greater bodily (interoceptive) awareness perceived their own arousal more accurately, implying the perception is a trainable skill most lack. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsxm.2016.09.018 ↩

7. Woo, Jane S. T., Nedra Morshedian, Lori A. Brotto, and Laurel Rawsthorne. "Sex Guilt Mediates the Relationship Between Religiosity and Sexual Desire in East Asian and Euro-Canadian College-Aged Women." Archives of Sexual Behavior 41, no. 6 (2012): 1485–1495. Sex guilt, not religiosity itself, carried the suppressive effect of religious upbringing on sexual desire, across two ethnically distinct samples. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-012-9918-6 ↩

8. Fisher, William A., Leonard A. White, Donn Byrne, and Kathryn Kelley. "Erotophobia-Erotophilia as a Dimension of Personality." Journal of Sex Research 25, no. 1 (1988): 123–151. A stable, socialization-learned disposition along which sexual cues are met with positive approach or aversive avoidance; restrictive and religious upbringing predicts the erotophobic pole and lower sexual self-knowledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224498809551448 ↩

9. Sawatsky, Joanna, Rebecca Lindenbach, Sheila Wray Gregoire, and Keith Gregoire. "Sanctified Sexism: Effects of Purity Culture Tropes on White Christian Women's Marital and Sexual Satisfaction and Experience of Sexual Pain." Sociology of Religion 86, no. 4 (2025): 519–543. In a sample of thousands of Christian women, belief in purity-culture tropes predicted lower satisfaction and higher rates of sexual pain; companion work documents shame-based sexual expectations formed before any sexual experience. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srae031 ↩

10. Graziani, Charlotte, and Meredith L. Chivers. "Sexual Shame and Women's Sexual Functioning." Sexes 5, no. 4 (2024): 47. Sexual shame inhibits arousal and desire, drives avoidance and dissociation, and produces anticipatory negative affect that degrades sexual experience before it begins. https://doi.org/10.3390/sexes5040047 ↩

11. Chesser, Sarah, Diana Parry, and Tracy Penny Light. "Nurturing the Erotic Self: Benefits of Women Consuming Sexually Explicit Materials." Sexualities 22, no. 7–8 (2019): 1234–1252. Women engage sexually explicit material agentically, using it to learn about and experiment with their own erotic selves. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460718791898 ↩

12. Madill, Anna, and Yao Zhao. "Are Female Paraphilias Hiding in Plain Sight? Risqué Male-Male Erotica for Women in Sinophone and Anglophone Regions." Archives of Sexual Behavior 51, no. 2 (2021): 897–910. A near-identical structure of paraphilic interest appeared across two cultures of women readers, expressed through fiction rather than action, suggesting reading is the venue where such desire becomes visible. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02107-4 ↩

13. Wright, Paul J. "Mass Media Effects on Youth Sexual Behavior: Assessing the Claim for Causality." Annals of the International Communication Association 35, no. 1 (2011): 343–385. The acquisition-activation-application model: sexual media can foster new sexual scripts a consumer did not previously hold, not only prime existing ones. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2011.11679121 ↩

14. Posner, Michael I., and Steven W. Keele. "On the Genesis of Abstract Ideas." Journal of Experimental Psychology 77, no. 3 (1968): 353–363. Shown only varied distortions, people abstract the unseen central-tendency prototype, demonstrating that prototype formation is an automatic result of exposure to similar instances. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025953 ↩

15. Langlois, Judith H., and Lori A. Roggman. "Attractive Faces Are Only Average." Psychological Science 1, no. 2 (1990): 115–121. Mathematically averaged composite faces were judged more attractive than nearly all of the individual faces composing them, and attractiveness rose as more faces were averaged in. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1990.tb00079.x ↩

16. Principe, Connor P., and Judith H. Langlois. "Shifting the Prototype: Experience with Faces Influences Affective and Attractiveness Preferences." Social Cognition 30, no. 1 (2012): 109–120. Attractiveness preference tracks the central tendency of the category one is exposed to, and that prototype shifts with exposure history. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2012.30.1.109 ↩

17. Tse, Dorothy, Rosamund F. Langston, Masaki Kakeyama, et al. "Schemas and Memory Consolidation." Science 316, no. 5821 (2007): 76–82. Information congruent with an existing schema is consolidated rapidly and becomes hippocampus-independent, so a single new instance is quickly absorbed into a well-developed schema. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1135935 ↩

18. Audrain, Sam, and Mary Pat McAndrews. "Schemas Provide a Scaffold for Neocortical Integration of New Memories Over Time." Nature Communications 13 (2022): 5559. Schema-congruent memories grow coarser and less episodically specific over days as they are integrated into the general schema. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33517-0 ↩

19. Belin, Pascal, Robert J. Zatorre, Philippe Lafaille, Pierre Ahad, and Bruce Pike. "Voice-Selective Areas in Human Auditory Cortex." Nature 403, no. 6767 (2000): 309–312. Dedicated temporal voice areas respond selectively to human voice and support extraction of speaker identity. https://doi.org/10.1038/35002078 ↩

20. Kanber, Esra, Clare Lally, Roni Razin, et al. "Representations of Personally Familiar Voices Are Better Resolved in the Brain." Current Biology 35 (2025). The brain builds richer, more distinct, person-like representations of personally familiar voices, encoding how a familiar voice varies across contexts; see also Giamundo et al., "Voice Identity Invariance by Anterior Temporal Lobe Neurons," Science Advances 11 (2025), on abstract, invariant voice-identity coding. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.03.081 ↩

21. Quintana, Gonzalo R., Conall E. Mac Cionnaith, and James G. Pfaus. "Behavioral, Neural, and Molecular Mechanisms of Conditioned Mate Preference: The Role of Opioids and First Experiences of Sexual Reward." International Journal of Molecular Sciences 23, no. 16 (2022): 8928. Partner preferences are crystallized when arousal and reward are paired with partner features, and once a "type" is conditioned it resists extinction. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms23168928 ↩

22. Brom, Mirte, Stephanie Both, Ellen Laan, Walter Everaerd, and Philip Spinhoven. "The Role of Conditioning, Learning and Dopamine in Sexual Behavior: A Narrative Review of Animal and Human Studies." Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 38 (2014): 38–59. Sexual arousal acquires its triggers through associative learning; neutral and contextual cues become arousing through conditioning, mere exposure, and related mechanisms. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.10.014 ↩

23. MacNeil, Sheila, and E. Sandra Byers. "Role of Sexual Self-Disclosure in the Sexual Satisfaction of Long-Term Heterosexual Couples." Journal of Sex Research 46, no. 1 (2009): 3–14. Disclosing sexual preferences raises satisfaction by an instrumental route (the partner learns what one wants) and an expressive route (disclosure builds intimacy). https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490802398399 ↩

24. Mallory, Allen B. "Dimensions of Couples' Sexual Communication, Relationship Satisfaction, and Sexual Satisfaction: A Meta-Analysis." Journal of Family Psychology 36, no. 3 (2021): 358–371. Across 93 studies, sexual self-disclosure correlated with sexual satisfaction at r = .39, and communication quality more strongly still. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000946 ↩

25. Lehmiller, Justin J. Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. New York: Da Capo, 2018. In a survey of more than 4,000 U.S. adults, about a third had never shared their favorite fantasy with a partner, non-disclosers expected a positive reaction far less often than disclosers actually received one, and most respondents fantasize partly to meet unmet sexual needs. ↩

26. Knowles, Kieran O., and Matthew D. Hammond. "Meta-Analyzing People's Self-Disclosure of Sexual Information to Romantic Partners." Journal of Sex Research 63, no. 3 (2026): 474–486. Embarrassment, shame, and fear of seeming abnormal are a distinct barrier suppressing sexual self-disclosure. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2025.2455543 ↩

27. Bezreh, Tanya, Thomas S. Weinberg, and Timothy Edgar. "BDSM Disclosure and Stigma Management: Identifying Opportunities for Sex Education." American Journal of Sexuality Education 7, no. 1 (2012): 37–61; with Waldura et al., "Fifty Shades of Stigma," Journal of Sexual Medicine 13, no. 12 (2016): 1918–1929, and Sprott et al., Journal of Sexual Medicine 18, no. 10 (2021): 1721–1731. Kink interests are pervasively stigmatized and concealed across domains of life, frequently even from a healthcare provider or therapist, driven by anticipated stigma. https://doi.org/10.1080/15546128.2012.650984 ↩

28. Slepian, Michael L., Jinseok S. Chun, and Malia F. Mason. "The Experience of Secrecy." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 1 (2017): 1–33; and Slepian, "The New Psychology of Secrecy," Current Directions in Psychological Science 33, no. 2 (2024). A secret harms chiefly through shame-driven mind-wandering to it, not the act of hiding, and sexual behavior is among the most commonly held secret categories. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000085 ↩

29. Willoughby, Brian J., Adam M. Farero, and Dean M. Busby. "Exploring the Effects of Sexual Desire Discrepancy Among Married Couples." Archives of Sexual Behavior 43, no. 3 (2014): 551–562. Higher sexual desire discrepancy predicted lower satisfaction and stability and more conflict, with the discrepancy near-universal across long-term couples. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-013-0181-2 ↩

30. Balzarini, Rhonda N., Amy Muise, Kiersten Dobson, et al. "The Detriments of Unmet Sexual Ideals and the Buffering Effect of Sexual Communal Strength." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 120, no. 6 (2021): 1521–1550. Perceiving that one's sexual ideals go unmet lowered sexual and relationship satisfaction for both partners. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000323 ↩

31. Vowels, Laura M., and Kristen P. Mark. "Strategies for Mitigating Sexual Desire Discrepancy in Relationships." Archives of Sexual Behavior 49, no. 3 (2020): 1017–1028. Masturbation, pornography, and fantasy were the most common strategies for managing an unmet sexual need. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01640-y ↩

32. Karhulahti, Veli-Matti, and Tanja Välisalo. "Fictosexuality, Fictoromance, and Fictophilia: A Qualitative Study of Love and Desire for Fictional Characters." Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2021): 575427. Fictional love-objects function as supernormal stimuli, with participants reporting stronger attraction to a fictional figure than to a real and well-liked partner. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.575427 ↩

33. Derrick, Jaye L., Shira Gabriel, and Kurt Hugenberg. "Social Surrogacy: How Favored Television Programs Provide the Experience of Belonging." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45, no. 2 (2009): 352–362. Favored media figures deliver a genuine experience of belonging and buffer against rejection, functioning as surrogates for unmet relational needs. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.003 ↩

34. ThriftBooks and OnePoll. "Romance & Real Life" (survey of 2,000 U.S. romance readers). 2024. A majority of readers said romance reading made them more selective about real partners, and about a third said it shaped their expectations of what love should feel like. https://www.thriftbooks.com/blog/romance-real-life-onepoll-survey/ ↩