What is a book boyfriend?

Readers have always fallen for characters; Mr Darcy has had admirers for two centuries. The phrase book boyfriend spread with romance blogs in the 2010s and became everyday vocabulary on BookTok, where readers rank theirs, defend them and hand them over to friends with a warning.

A book boyfriend is written from her side. The reader sees what he notices, hears what he thinks about the heroine, and knows that under the silence he is devoted. That inside view is what real men cannot offer, and it is the whole appeal.

The common types have their own names:

• The golden retriever: sunny, loyal, openly in love.
• The morally grey one: dangerous to everyone except her.
• The grump: says little, does everything.
• The slow burn: three hundred pages before he touches her hand.
• The gentleman: older, certain, in no hurry.

No. Feeling something real for a character is what fiction is for, and readers know the difference between a novel and a marriage. A book boyfriend is a way to find out what you like: the attention, the patience, the kind of confidence that attracts you.

Many readers say it raised their standards, in the useful sense that they learned to name what they want.

The newest version of the book boyfriend answers back. An AI character is written like a man in a novel, with a past and a voice, and then replies to what you say. The men of Beau de Nuit are made that way: a few characters, written at length, each with his own first sentence.