Vying for their audiences’ attention, women's conduct manuals, especially those authored by clergymen, were quick to denounce the pitfalls to which novela rosa exposed its readers. Not only did marriage mean sacrifice and renunciation—not perpetual bliss, as these novels would have them believe—but the irresistible good looks and fortune of the male protagonists were likely to foster unrealistic expectations and an unseemly view of marriage as a consequence of “un flechazo” (love at first sight) or, still worse, of convenience. Nevertheless, it was agreed that the most effective way to steer women toward their officially sanctioned end with their virtue intact was through idealism and ignorance. For this reason, the Francoist ideologues considered la novela rosa “un mal menor” (“a lesser evil”), if not an expedient means of distraction and indoctrination. Commenting on the relationship between women's prescriptive guides to socialization and popular romance novels, Martín Gaite remarks:

The road to marriage was thus paved with innocent dreams and limited knowledge, which the reading of novelas rosa, far from challenging, was meant to buttress.

The extent to which representations of marriageable women, suffused by romantic fantasies and bourgeois sensibilities, upheld the status quo may also be glimpsed through the pages of contemporaneous women's magazines.