Romance Novels in the Time of Late-Late Stage Capitalism
Or, why I can't stand the contemporary romance genre anymore.
I was sixteen when I read my first adult romance novel. It had not occurred to me before to look for them. In middle school, I’d gravitated towards fantasy if only for the romantic subplots, picked up the happier Sarah Dessen novels sans the violence and abuse, flipped through thick sci-fi books, bored until the kissing started. I felt awkward and guilty for having as frivolous of interests such as love and romance and, ever elusive to me, sex. When I read Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game on a whim the fall of my junior year, I described it aloud as a book of no substance. I didn’t name it. I knew it was something to be embarrassed about.
Still, I couldn’t deny that I was affected.1 I was more than affected. I was aging out of young adult, perilously close to surpassing its characters, if not in life experience then at least in rotations around the sun, but I still craved fiction that gave me something to aspire to. In adult romance, everyone was twenty-seven or thirty-two. It was okay that I had not fallen in love in high school with a high school boy I would have to pretend I wouldn’t one day leave or be left by, because there was at least a decade between myself and eternal love. Eternal love with several inches on me, an unruly dark curl in his hair, a stable career, and a solid grasp of basic communication skills. First, as any other good beginning for an adult relationship, we’d be enemies until we were kissing—in an elevator, in the rain, in the sickbed. There would be strife until reprieve. Then we’d get the happily ever after in some stylish New York apartment.
The pandemic only sped things along. Between 2020 and 2021, years I spent mostly confined to the four walls of my bedroom pretending to pay attention to online-school, I read forty-one romances (a number that excludes the many I reread, many times). In isolation I did not read books as much as consume them. I wanted my heart rate up. I wanted reassurance, a good time, a guarantee. Unlike the news, there was nothing to doubt in a romance novel; no ifs, only whens.
By the end of 2020, I didn’t only want to read romance but write it. This was mortifying for a number of reasons, such as: the most engagement I had with other writers was on Tumblr, a place appearing to be populated solely by asexuals exclusively partial to fanfic2; my progressive, feminist friends and I simply did not talk about romantic (let alone sexual) desires; and on Twitter, I saw take after take about how belittled romance readers and writers were. Sexual and romantic desire was not shameful, except when it was the focus of your artistic work and intellectual thought. Meanwhile I was entirely unaware that on another social media platform I refused to engage with, the genre was blowing up and about to completely rattle the publishing industry. It might not have been any more respected, but it was certainly integrating into wider pop culture.
Four years later and I am nearly twenty-one. I am a year out from graduating college. My life is as romantically and sexually boring as it’s ever been, and the great promise of the romance genre—optimism, aspiration, escapism, that golden stamp of a happily ever after—has begun to not only sour but ring entirely false. Call me a contrarian determined to stomp all over everything I have ever loved, but the more romance I read, the more convinced I am of the sickness running through it.
It’d been a long time since a book well and truly pissed me off, but Abby Jimenez’s 2023 novel Yours Truly reminded me of the anger a piece of literature can arise in me. I’ve probably read worse romances, and it’s unlikely that it even ranks among the most offensive, but unfortunately for Jimenez, Yours Truly came to me at the worst possible time, consolidating so many of the things that have been bothering me about the romance genre for ages.
I have a lot of grievances with this book, most of which I ranted about in a January Goodreads (AKA the domain of the plebs) review3, but the one that stands out the most is the cynicism underlying it.
Shouldn’t it be contradictory? Cynicism in a romance novel that follows the structure to a T—the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, an epistolary plummet into love, some fake dating which rapidly transforms into real love, the third act breakup, and the happily ever after with babies to boot4? Yours Truly, as all other romances do, follows two people as they do the impossible—fall in love, care for each other, commit to each other. Love literally prevails. But… does it? Because I would argue that the frictionless beings occupying the paper dollhouse of Yours Truly play out merely a miserable facsimile of love.
Our first player is ER doctor Briana, the jilted divorcée burned by an Evil Male Ex. You don’t know the Evil Male Ex? Allow me to jog your memory: this is the asshole who has cheated on her, neglected her, lied to her and lied around doing fuck all. He is little more than a moronic child. He is not only the face of all the Bad Men that came before but the foil for the love interest—our second player, ER doctor Jacob, our sweet, perfect, honorable, handsome hero. I know the defense: it’s a fantasy that still acknowledges women’s pain. When so many women have been in disappointing relationships, why can’t we imagine that men will be nice to us, be courageous and assertive, or, I don’t know, at the very least give us orgasms? That’s the underlying message, right? Because of the patriarchy, men will take women for granted, mistreat us, treat us like shit. In fact, Briana says it a number of times:
“Every man is him! You are all the fucking same!… You aren’t until you are.”
“Jacob was a man. And men do what men do. I suddenly viewed my sweet, docile boyfriend like a wild animal raised in captivity. Tamed and domesticated—but might still bite one day, just because the instinct was bred into his genes.”5
Because of her Evil Ex, Briana won’t put up with any men anymore. Her string of bad internet dates just proves it to her. Every man this woman has come into romantic contact with is a misery-inducing waste of space. Except, of course, for the handsome, cinnamon roll hero! A hero who absolutely no one would ever argue could exist in real life.
So what is this saying about society? I’m not claiming romance is nor should be read as a how-to guide to find a man, but I do think it has an aspirational function, and I do think it reflects the desires of real women. With that in mind, Jimenez is claiming that, in a very real world of misogyny and violence, women are paired with miserable men and, if they’re not stuck with them, they’re left by them. Women are better off single, sequestered away from men—unless. Unless she meets a man who will remake his entire life around hers, cut out his own heart, offer it to her as immolation6. It’s one or the other; it can never be the other.
I guess I am trying to fathom why it’s so miserable a conclusion for a woman to end up with a man7 who, while not a perfect specimen who can do no wrong and will never disappoint her, tries very hard to be good to her, to make it a good relationship, to provide laughter and good conversation. Maybe he can’t anticipate all of her needs, understand her in the way she wishes a person could (though I take issue with the proclamation that we could ever be totally understood; name me a single person who even understands themselves), but that’s not the end of the world. Because there’s still love and respect, and there’s still effort to see what lies between, to mend those gaps, even if they will never be mended. It’s in the attempt.
So maybe you picked up a romance novel to escape the pandemic. Or maybe your mother is sick. Or you’re going through a divorce. You want to escape the news. You want to forget that there’s a mass shooting every day, that the United States is funding a genocide, that you can’t afford your healthcare. Here is a world (probably) untouched by serious illness and death, where the stakes have never been lower, where everything stifling in a heroine’s life can be surmounted with a little character development and courage, all before the last page. You wanted to get the fuck out of your own head: here’s an escape route. Here are a million escape routes.
I’m not one to judge; all I do is look for peep holes out of my own hardships and rough patches and into other lives, other minds.
But we’re not only escaping the hard times in life. We are also escaping life itself. As we blink out of ourselves and into the lives of two characters falling headfirst into love, the feeling that erupts or lingers isn’t dissimilar to the synthetic intimacy we experience while scrolling for hours on our phones. With romance—this never ending deluge of content that arrives at our libraries and our bookshops and the godforsaken Kindle Unlimited catalog—we can put as much space between ourselves and reality as we want.
And why wouldn’t we want space from reality? Daily life is increasingly unaffordable. Our debts are mounting and our rights are shrinking. In the attempt to achieve a frictionless existence that might make the expenses and losses worthwhile we have found loneliness instead. If there is little meaningful connection to be found, then it’s only natural to ask books or TV or film or podcasts to fill the absence.
Maybe my problem is less with contemporary romance than it is with the publishing industry and the economic system it, and every genre, operates under. But it’s the genre’s standards that accentuate the fact that the capitalist forces underlying the industry always pull ahead of the creative ones. Romance writers are expected to release at least one book a year, books that can be easily categorized into digestible, recognizable tropes like fake dating, childhood friends to lovers, there’s-only-one-bed, grumpy-sunshine, and, perhaps my least favorite, the billionaire romance.
These tropes, while arguably useful for the reader-consumer, are more useful for publishers pushing units. If tropes begin as entry points for us to discover what sparks delight, when they are repurposed as a sole advertising strategy, books turn into empty vessels with little substance. Madison Huizinga of Cafe Hysteria writes in her essay “BookTok Is Turning Books into Commodities”,
As with some of the hyper-sexual material, other aspects of BookTok books can have a manufactured quality. That’s likely because they are being produced by a publisher that understands what sells, on a granular, algorithmic level. It’s not uncommon for publishing houses to reach out to BookTok influences to promote their newest releases - books that have been meticulously selected and written with a conscious and unconscious awareness of what will thrive online.
Romance is produced to be consumed like potato chips, and with Penguin Random House8 CEO Nihar Malaviya touting AI as a cheap solution for increasing market share by publishing even more than the 70,000 digital and 15,000 print titles a year than it already does, the genre is in prime position to grow even more saturated with bingeable, reproducible content.
The romance genre asks readers to pick their poison and then never put the Kool Aid down. The Kool Aid is bottomless. Drink forever. Life is hard! You deserve a treat. Have another—there’s plenty more where that came from.
Escapism is not all bad, but when so much of our lives are spent luxuriating in it—whether that is with a romance novel, reality television, or TikTok9—it’s difficult to see it as a net positive. It would be inflammatory to say that the romance genre is an evil to be rid of, but I do think it and its popularity is a reflection of where the fractures in society have landed us. It is so very easy to become avoidant, despondent, and reluctant to engage critically with literature, let alone the dystopian hell we occupy, when our corporate oligarchs ensure that we feel too powerless to try.
And as I write all of this, as I think about all of the romances that have infuriated me with their cheap, bad jokes and their black-and-white morality and shallow characterization, I can’t keep going back for more. As I approach finals and my summer break, I am desperate for the day I can shut off my brain and read Emily Henry’s new book even as I know it will probably fall into the same traps her peers do and disappoint me. We are exhausted by our lives, and so we will cash the check, give the money to the ones who help imprison us within them, and pretend that they’re allowing us to make a break for it.
Several rereads later, and I realized that The Hating Game is really a story about two people who just really want to fuck.
OK, yes, I’m now aware that the vast majority of fanfiction is romantic and smutty as hell, but as an older teenager whose favorite media had little fandom to speak of, I put fanfic and romance in entirely separate categories. Though the label of fanfic comes with a lot of shame, I felt shame for making up my own characters if only to make them kiss. Fanfiction was leisure; it was allowed to be filthy and romantic. I wanted to make a career out of it (though of course plenty of fanfiction writers have decided to do both! But that’s another essay).
I’m adapting parts of that review here, as much of it is in essence the first draft for this essay.
So many babies. This is coming from someone who has enjoyed many books about motherhood and loves kids, but there are too many pregnant women at the end of this book.
Reading this quote after two and a half years in the sanctity of my Historically Women’s College was a wild confrontation with how far gender politics still has to go. I find it incredibly problematic to view men as so inherently, genetically, predatory as opposed to being socialized into a predisposition for more aggressive and violent behaviors with few coping mechanisms.
I feel I must note that this man decides to donate an organ almost immediately after meeting Briana.
A man who scarcely exists in contemporary romance.
Penguin Random House is the parent company of the imprint Berkley Books, the publisher of best-selling romance authors such as Emily Henry, Ali Hazelwood, Ashley Poston, and Jasmine Guillory.
These are feminized examples, but this is not to say that men do not find their own sources of escape, or that women do not also turn to ‘masculine’ sources. Given that heterosexual women are the primary readers of romance, I’m most focused on the basic ‘guilty pleasures’ these women turn to.