Understanding Relationships Through Books

I read really quickly. This means that I go through a lot of books. I do, however, have some requirements for what I read and since right now I'm in a paranormal romance phase. I am using the following criteria: female author, strong protagonist, strong female characters and the romance needs to be an alpha finding an alpha. I firmly believe that people do best with someone whose personality is as strong as theirs. I don't want people to submit to me and I certainly don't want to submit to anyone else.

I am really impressed with Alpha with Alpha romance stories. As an alpha married to an alpha with Alpha children I find that reading these stories gives me the language to talk with my kids about how they need to look for someone with similar strength when looking for a partner.

If someone is a Beta then they are a poor Alpha partner because an Alpha should want an equal and not someone to subjugate. I do think that there are times when an Alpha can find a perfect match in an Omega, but that takes a special kind of Alpha.

As a parent I try to give my kids as many insights as I can in regards to social interaction. We are all Alpha Introverts and we don't often read social cues well, but we like to be in charge so that can be a huge challenge. We often misread people and come off as bossy or controlling, it's a real problem.

I find that while the stories are not uniformly good, the books I have found do have some great characters and they are what I use to try and figure out how people work and what I think is a good relationship.

I also find that the books where the female is equal to the male is a great way to think about the ways gender roles can change in society. There is often a group of people looking after one another so that children can come into a clan and not mean that the female is required to take on the main burden of child rearing. It hearkens back to the time of extended family without relying on biological family, but creating family.

It does seem that for relationships to stay strong between a bonded pair we need a better community for our kids and while this is a common conversation I am wondering if we are looking at this the wrong way around. We are particularly limited in the US due to the reality that our health insurance is tied to our employment  This generally requires that one person needs to have a job in the mainstream employment world, which means that they will not be able to be an equal caretaker of the children since their job does not come with the flexibility required to effectively co-parent.

I like the idea of the way lives are organized in many of the shifter worlds where people of the same clan live together and they share the joys of caring for each others' kids. I realize that this is not a world that I can realistically create within the mainstream of anything, but I like to think about this and how pieces might work and create effective change.