Not one bodice ripped

Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl. I don't know what percentage of literature follows this basic pattern, but it's got to be considerable; writer-director Preston Sturges, in the Forties film The Palm Beach Story, sums up all this arcane man/woman stuff as "Topic A", and he wasn't exaggerating a bit.

If you tell the tale from her point of view, you inevitably end up with something called the Romance Novel, a genre of fiction scorned by readers of lad mags and embraced by women (and a few men) for whom this simplest of stories neatly splits the difference between fantasy and fact. Susanna Cornett, a respected fantasy figure in her own right, has done, shall we say, lots of research in this area:

Said rancher is an archetype: if you seek to win her heart, a resemblance to him is a definite plus. And truth be told, I'm not exactly immune to this sort of thing myself.