What Makes a Cinnamon Roll

The cinnamon roll hero is a romance archetype that gets dismissed almost as soon as it gets named.

You’ve seen the dismissal. It comes from two directions. The first is from readers who think sweet means boring — that a kind man, on the page, must lack tension. The second is from writers who think a cinnamon roll is just the opposite of a bad boy — sweet where the bad boy is rough, soft where he’s sharp. As if the archetype is defined by negation.

I want to argue that both groups have it wrong. The cinnamon roll isn’t the absence of the bad boy. It’s a different engine.

The four marks of a cinnamon roll

Here’s how I think about it. A cinnamon roll hero is a man with four things in him at once, and the romance is built on the tension between them.

1. He notices. He is paying attention to the heroine — what she orders, what she says no to, what time she gets tired. He doesn’t announce that he notices. He just does. The reader sees it, in the small physical details. The heroine, half the time, doesn’t.
2. He is patient. Not passive — patient. He is choosing to wait. The choice is a constant low burn. He could push. He doesn’t.
3. He has a line. This is the part the genre forgets at its peril. The cinnamon roll has one thing he will not bend on — a value, a person, a piece of history he won’t betray. The romance has to find this line and walk it. When it does, the kindest man in the room becomes the most unmoving man in the room. That is the spice.
4. He says the small things. Not the speech. Not the speech. The small things. I got your coffee. I’ll be in the back. Let me know. These are the lines that, over two hundred pages, do the work of a thousand speeches.

That’s the recipe, for me. He notices. He’s patient. He has a line. He says the small things.

What people miss

The thing people miss about the cinnamon roll is that the kindness is not the absence of edge. The kindness is itself the edge.

A man who pays close attention is dangerous in a romance, because attention earns trust, and trust is what the heroine has been protecting from everyone else in her life. A man who is patient is dangerous because patience is itself a form of confidence — he is so sure of his own ground that he doesn’t need to rush. A man who says small things is dangerous because one of those small things is going to land on her, on the third or fourth chapter, and break her open in a way the speech-giver never could.

The cinnamon roll is the hero who arrives quietly and stays. That is, in a romance, the most romantic thing a man can do.

I will, every time, take him over the rest of them.