
Why is this you might wonder? One reason is these names conjure up romantic images. Dashing men who would sweep ordinary women out of their hum drum lives. The movie, Pretty Woman, won big with this accepted lie. C’mon, people, is a millionaire even going to let a twenty-dollar hooker in his car? I think not. While a five hundred dollar one would suit his purposes fine. She wouldn’t even need a new wardrobe, but you wouldn’t have the rags to true love and riches story, though.
The men on covers of romance books are tall, muscular and handsome. Do they have to be rich too? Good question, do they? They absolutely have to be for some women or men to pick up the book. They want a Cinderella story. Not the actual one the Brothers Grimm wrote where Cinderella had her evil stepsisters blinded and sent off into the forest. They want the one were the woman gets the prince, the palace and the power.
To achieve this huge status change, you need gobs of money. Love is not enough anymore. Falling for a comfortable doctor or a kind lawyer doesn’t cut it. Women apparently want money more than actual affection this is brought home by Fifty Shades of Grey and its devoted following. A man can ignore you, abuse you, degrade you, ridicule you, but if he’s a handsome billionaire then he’s the answer to your dream. The pivotal word in the previous sentence was billionaire.
Millionaires don’t cut it anymore. A recent look at Amazon’s offerings in the billionaire romance department offered: Bad Boys Billionaire Club, Borrowed Billionaire, Billionaire’s Revenge, My First Billionaire, The Billionaire’s Seduction, Dallas Billionaires, Heart of the Billionaire, and Billionaire’s Defiant Mistress. There are over 4000 more romance titles with word billionaire in it just on Amazon.
My point is the billionaire is the new millionaire. Why does a woman need a billionaire? She never ever wants to think about working or paying bills. Life should be a continual party jetting from exotic island locales to international cities in a private plane. Apparently, it looked like the millionaire might run out of funds with everything going up in price.
The billionaire can dazzle the impoverished or small town girl. A billionaire has to work to impress a wealthy woman because she comes from money. What is wrong with the billionaire scenario? Not much, if you ask the authors whose books are flying off the shelf.
There is a soft, compassionate part of me that wonders when gold money clips and ropes replaced genuine caring. Are we teaching our young women if the man has enough money that he has you? Most of the women who read the books will call them harmless fantasies. This is true. Consider we read romance novels because part of us wishes it could happen. Then there is the inflation issue. When will the billionaire not make enough to lift us out of our humdrum existence. Gadzillionaire is difficult to say, never mind getting your mind around how money is involved.
Has inflation cheapened the idea of romance? What is your opinion?