By Jayne Bodmann
At least once a week, I hear someone say something to the effect of, “Romance novels are all the same.” And I would say 80% of the time, it comes from men.
“Romance” as a category still feels a little like a four-letter word. A lot of people read it—the genre generated $1.44 billion in revenue between May 2022 and May 2023—but they still make a good chunk of the population clutch their pearls. And quite frankly, it’s a lame excuse not to pick up a book. Love is a universal language. We all speak it. Some of us define it differently, but most of us have or want love in our lives.
So why, exactly, is the genre built on a universal language the one we’re most comfortable shunning?
The “Romance Is Trash” Viewpoint
There’s a shocking amount of confidence on display when someone declares an entire genre “trash.” A lot of people do it with fantasy or sci-fi too. (I’m looking at you, book clubs… mine anyway.) Making sweeping generalizations about a category of books that spans genres is ignorant and lazy. The subtext there is: I’ve decided the category is beneath me, and I will not be taking questions.
And look, I get it. There is absolutely some crappy romance shit out there. The smut dragon series you see everywhere? I don’t care how many TikToks cry over it; those books are not for me, and I’m allowed to say that. I read one. But just because they aren’t for me doesn’t mean they aren’t for anyone. If that’s the gateway someone needs to get back into reading, then go off.
You don’t have to enjoy every book. You aren’t supposed to. But you also shouldn’t make other people feel bad because they do like it. And you shouldn’t forego an entire category of books because you didn’t like one of them.
If you read one dragon book and hated it, that doesn’t mean all romantasy is trash. If you read a single rom‑com in 1998 and it wasn’t “for you,” that doesn’t mean every contemporary romance isn’t good. It just means that specific book wasn’t for you.
Genres are big. They contain multitudes. Opting out of an entire section of the bookstore based on one bad experience isn’t discerning—it’s lazy. Go do a search for your three favorite things followed by the word “romance.” Seven bucks says there’s a book out there for you, because that’s how vast the category is.
The Weird, Wonderful Middle: “Is This Romance?” Yes, Actually
Here’s where the old view of romance really starts to crumble.
When I say “romance,” I don’t just mean mass‑market paperbacks with airbrushed abs and titles you forget by the time you hit the last page. I mean books like:
- The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune: a soft, wildly imaginative story about belonging, found family, and love that just happens to be wrapped in magic and bureaucracy. It’s tender, low-spice, and might just open your eyes to love that looks like yours—and doesn’t—all at the same time.
- The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst: a cottagecore cozy fantasy where the “romantic” thread isn’t bolted on for marketing. There’s found family, a sentient spider plant, and a handsome (nosy) neighbor, but underneath all the cozy romance is a story about starting over and figuring out how to let people in after you’ve spent years alone.
Are these shelved as fantasy? Sometimes. As romance? Sometimes. As “I’m not sure where this goes, but I loved it”? Often.
The point is: if your idea of romance stops at “boy meets girl, misunderstanding, big gesture, fade to black,” you’re missing a huge swath of books that are playing with structure, genre, and expectation. Yet they’re all still centered around human connection.
When “Just Romance” Is Doing a Lot More
There’s a whole group of books that get shoved into the romance category simply because love is central to the story, when what they’re actually doing is much bigger.
I’m talking about novels that:
- Tackle grief, ambition, creative burnout, family history, and identity with sharp, deliberate prose.
- Use relationships as the lens to explore questions like: Who am I when I’m not performing for other people? What happens when my version of success collides with someone else’s?
- Build characters so specific and human that you can hear them in your head long after you close the book.
Think about the kind of novel that gets passed around in book clubs because it’s “so well written,” the ones about marriage, identity, and survival. That’s often literary or upmarket romance in disguise. For example, books like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid or This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum hinge on relationships but really unpack ambition, regret, or even twisty, mystery-level tension.
These books are absolutely called “literary” or “upmarket,” but with romance attached, they get lumped in with anything and everything that happens to live in the romance category. They get shelved with the easy-breezy “beach reads,” so a lot of people overlook them. There’s nothing wrong with the lighter books; I have a stack of them on my TBR shelves. But if you’re looking for cream-of-the-crop storytelling, with genre-breaking plots, exceptional character development, and the kind of writing that stays with you long after you’ve closed the book, these are for you.
The only reason they get downgraded in the conversation is that the payoff is love instead of trauma or a twist ending, as if a great love is easy to find. If the emotional throughline were anything other than romance, they’d be up there with the book-club darlings and “serious” upmarket fiction we love to talk about with our friends.
That’s the part that frustrates me. It’s not that they’re grouped with romance, but that “romance” is treated like a lesser label, as if the presence of love automatically makes the craft less impressive. It doesn’t. In a lot of cases, the writing is doing the same careful, precise work as the “serious” novels we all admire. And in many of them, that work is making people feel seen.
Simply put, if you insist on treating romance as lesser while talking about books like these, that says more about your genre bias than the writing itself.
The Trope That Actually Needs to Die
The original assignment I got for this piece was something like: “This traditional romance trope needs to disappear for good.” Honestly? The trope I want gone isn’t enemies‑to‑lovers or miscommunication stretched over 300 pages. Those can be delightful, terrible, or boring depending on who’s writing them.
The trope I want gone is this: “Romance is inherently lesser.”
Under that umbrella, you get a whole messy cluster of assumptions:
- Romance is easy to write.
- Romance readers are unserious.
- If something is popular and emotional, it can’t be “good.”
Meanwhile, we act like genre fiction with a body count and a twist somehow earns more respect than genre fiction where people fall in love and build lives together. As if violence is automatically more sophisticated than vulnerability.
Spoiler alert: it isn’t.
Writing a story where readers care enough to stay up too late for a payoff their rational brain knows is coming is hard. Landing emotional beats without tipping into saccharine or melodrama? Hard. Building characters who feel real enough that strangers argue about their choices online for months? Also hard.
Romance does that every day, and often under the weight of people ready to roll their eyes before they reach page one.
Romance as a Gateway, Not a Guilty Secret
Here’s where I’m softening my own stance.
I can rant for days about flat writing and lazy plotting. I’m a picky reader, and I want a damn good plot and some well-written characters. But I’m done pretending that someone else’s beloved romance is a moral failure.
If the dragon book that makes me cringe is the same book that gets a lapsed reader to pick up a novel after 10 years? That’s a win. If a “cheesy” rom‑com convinces a teenager that reading can feel like a hangout instead of homework? Another win.
We need the gateway books. We need the ones that are pure fun, even when they’re not pushing craft boundaries because they’re often the ones that pull people back into reading.
There Really Is a Romance for Everyone
Romance is not a single shelf.
It’s:
- Quiet, character‑driven stories about people figuring out who they are.
- High‑concept fantasy where the fate of the world and the fate of the relationship carry equal weight.
- Cozy, low‑stakes tales that treat kindness as radical.
- Sharp, contemporary narratives about careers, friendships, and what we owe each other.
Some break every trope. Some wear them like an old cardigan. Some are brilliantly written. Some are straight comfort food. And all of them belong under the romance umbrella—for better or for worse.
So when someone waves off romance with a dismissive “it’s all the same,” what they’re really saying is, “I haven’t bothered to see how much it’s changed.”
I hope we can all agree that’s ignorant and small‑minded.
Romance isn’t the problem. It’s our willingness to cling to an outdated definition instead of admitting the genre has grown up, branched out, and, in many corners, is equal to the stuff we’re still insisting is more “serious.”
If you haven’t looked at romance lately, maybe you should. There’s a lot of good stuff you’re missing out on.
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