PREFACE: The System for Her Series

The moment I bought my own copy of The Dating Dictionary/The System by Doc Love (www.doclove.com) , I knew it was my best non-fiction book purchase ever. The System is based on over 10,000 interviews with women by Doc Love and written to help men with relationships. But it offers universal truths for women too!

It also is funny and it is insightful. It even has a diagram! (The Truth Triangle). As I kept reading it (the requisite minimum 15 times), the life lessons came alive. Of all the types of men in the world, Doc Love advises his disciples to become a ‘Gentleman’ or ‘GentleMan’ by emulating the best of the Cary Grant movies.

I think of Roger O Thornhill in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. He’s witty, clever, proactive, and later on, is kindness itself. Looking for Miss Right to bring home to Mom, he leads with his heart, not his hormones. On the screen is the Gentleman personified.

I suddenly realized Doc Love’s Gentleman is in print too.  Women tend to be book readers – romance novels of every way to get to Happily Ever After (HEA) are our gender’s guilty pleasure!  Here he is, the hero of every Betty Neels novel!

For those of you who never heard of the British author, she was a retired nurse who published her first book at the age of 59 and wrote a total of 135 stories in a 30 year writing career. (In fall of 2017, the family of ‘Betty Neels’ confirmed to me that there were no unfinished stories at the time of her passing.) Harlequin Mills & Boon still reprints her books which the author firmly kept free of pre-marital relations AKA ‘going to Brighton’ as the fansite The Uncrushable Jersey Dress would put it (www.everyneelsthing.blogspot.com ).

Instead, Mrs. Neels (the pseudonym of Evelyn Jessy Meier) filled her books with many a rich Dutch or British doctor/ physician/ surgeon (RDD and RBD) and the rare outlier other professional who are all GentleMen in the Doc Love sense of the term.  In this book, I take pleasure in pointing out exactly how the men of Doc Love’s The System show up in Betty Neels’s books, from the Wimpus Americanus to Macho Boy to the top prize, the 3%er Gentleman.

And Betty Neels and Doc Love are on the same page as well on how we ladies can do to make the best of ourselves for our own sake. And his rule “One Chance Per Girl Per Lifetime” swings both ways – Alethea should have read The Dating Dictionary to recover from Dr Brighton Boy! (But then we would not have the book Sun and Candlelight – although that would have spared Alethea those horrid stepchildren…)

It has taken years of reflecting and research myself to adapt The System in its men-focused form to this 4-part book series, The System for Women:

1. Overview
2. Hero
3. Heroine
4. Happily Ever After