How to Find a Good Man Advice from Jane Austen By Lori Smith l Relationship Advice l Love Advice

Are you in need of a guide to see you through the potential pitfalls of modern life and love? Do you wonder if there are any good guys left out there? Jane Austen, author of so many of our favorite love stories (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion, among others) just may have something to teach us. What would she tell us if she could guide us toward our own Mr. Darcy?

Lori Smith is the author of Jane Austen’s Guide to Life: Thoughtful Lessons for the Modern Woman and A Walk with Jane Austen: A Journey into Adventure, Love, and Faith. Visit her online at www.writerlorismith.com.

Look for a Good Guy

It goes without saying that if you want to end up with a good guy (you do, right?) that you should actually look for a good guy - a goodhearted guy, someone who will treat you and others well. Austen would understand the appeal of a good-looking guy worth 10,000 pounds a year (the modern-day equivalent of a seven-figure salary), but she would think we were fools if we didn’t look beyond physical appearance and money and all the other surface-y things to the more important substance underneath.

Finding a good guy doesn’t have so much to do with where we look as how we look. It’s about our attitude toward dating, about striving to know someone at a deeper level, to know who he is (e.g., thoughtful, humble) rather than just what he is (good-looking, well-educated).

Build Love on the Foundation of Esteem

Esteem may not be in use much today, but for Austen, love could not exist without it. Imitating Austen herself, her characters want to evaluate a man and find out, can they esteem him? Is he worthy of their respect, their admiration? Without that, they could never love.

In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth only begins to love Darcy after she hears what his housekeeper has to say about him. The old servant fairly glows as she talks of her master, describing him as kindhearted and good-natured, a giving brother, and the best landlord. When Elizabeth learns that she can respect Darcy, she begins to think she could love him after all.

Use Your Mind and Your Heart

For us, love is all about feeling. For Austen, romance was as much about thought as feeling, and involved the mind as well as the heart. Austen knew that feelings alone - passionate as they may be - could easily lead one into error.

This is where Marianne goes wrong in Sense and Sensibility. When she meets Willoughby, she is guided solely by emotion, believing her feelings could never err. When he leaves her without explanation, ignores her letters, and becomes engaged to someone else, her misery makes her so ill that she nearly dies. If Marianne could advise us, she would tell us not to give feelings supremacy but to govern them with careful thought.

Question the Nature of Love at First Sight

Compared to Austen, we are a generation of hopeless romantics, just waiting to catch sight of the right person and fall head over heels into lifelong happiness. We may be surprised - Austen wouldn’t have any of that. She doesn’t give us any successful stories of love at first sight. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth gives “somewhat of a trial to [this] method, in her partiality for Wickham,” but meets only with “ill-success.” She is charmed by his good looks and his red coat, and, compared to Darcy, he seems the perfect gentleman.

But this kind of love, “arising on a first interview with its object ... even before two words have been exchanged” ends up being devastatingly wrong for Elizabeth. As she discovered later, Darcy was the one with all the goodness, while devious Wickham had only the appearance of it. Her first impressions failed her horribly. Through Elizabeth, Austen cautions us not to jump too quickly into love, not to entirely trust that love-at-first-sight moment. What we see here is Austen’s voice of caution. I think her greatest advice to us would be to watch carefully, to not commit too quickly before we really understand a guy’s character. When your happiness depends in large part on the nature of the person you’re with - as it still does these days, no matter how different our lives are from Austen’s in other ways - you want to make sure that guy is a good guy.