Romance is More Than Genre, but We Aren’t Treating It That Way

I finished the first draft of Vindico in the final hours of 2023. It’s a work that began just as short character sketches starting in 2017 and finally taking shape in late 2020. What I didn’t know, however, was the genre I wanted it to be. That answer came too. I knew I wanted something worthy of Dumas and Austen, but wasn’t sure how to translate that into 21st-century terms.

That answer also came to me late last year when I read Nora Roberts’s Whisky Beach and have since tried to devour every other novel she’s produced in her very long career. The answer was romantic suspense. It was close to the feel of some of my favorite classics, but not as formulaic as some of the other options on the current market.

My problem is where this genre has gone in recent years. Gone are the days of the great romantics like Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot. Even Nora Roberts’ formidable thrillers of the 80s and 90s have fallen largely by the wayside. Yet, these are the writers who inspired me and have inspired hundreds of others.

These days, many “romantic” novels are thinly veiled excuses for what used to be tagged PWP (Porn with Plot) back when fan fiction was the main form of publishing fiction online. The gratuitousness of the sex extends to the violence and the trauma characters suffer as well. Few deal with real-life issues or ideas with real-life applications in a way that is fresh, exciting, and inspiring.

Instead, there’s a thin plot meant mostly to play to tropes and sex scenes. While this may be fun beach reading for some, it’s not for constant consumption. Like sugar and artificial anything, it’s best in small amounts.

So, let’s look at the romantic novel again. This time, from what romance used to be and what it could be again. This requires some backtracking through the classics, but it also requires we re-examine some definitions.

What is romance, anyway?

In my reading experience, romance has to do with a way of seeing the world more than anything else. It’s a quest both for glory and for love. It’s a way of facing the world, and it’s a story that should inspire you to what could be possible rather than what currently exists. The “romance” that we identify as such is only one small piece of the puzzle.

Let’s go into why this is the case.

For definition, I’m going to pull in two references I kept from my college days. They have proven themselves incredibly useful over the years: A Handbook to Literature by William Harmon and Hugh Holman (Harmon and Holman), and Dictionary of Critical Theory by David Baez.

You can think of these as highly specialized dictionaries, specifically for literary terms.

Consulting the definition of “romance” in either reference, the first thing mentioned is language. Specifically, “romance” refers to the family of languages derived from Latin, hence “Rome + -ance” Our first natural conclusion, therefore, is to think of Rome.

That a mere city should grow to rule the known world is a romantic idea—an idea more suitable for a fairytale than a history book in our realism-obsessed literature. It’s the classic Cinderella fairytale on a grander scale.

Indeed, if you go with Virgil’s mythical but compelling narrative of the Trojans becoming the Romans, then it is fairy-tale-like. The conquered nation becomes the conqueror and builds something that continues today. They do not allow themselves to be tossed about. They do, they act, and they achieve. Granted, they consult the “gods”—but they do not let that keep them from acting.

It’s a far cry from Walt Disney, but then fairy tales aren’t supposed to be completely fuzzy and warm. There is real danger, real terror, and real trauma, but there is also real triumph at the end.

This should tell you what romance is or should be at base. It’s a story about people caught in circumstances beyond their control but who persevere and accomplish things they only dreamed were possible. They get the person they love; they defeat the forces that work against them, and they find happiness, love, and fulfillment because they are brave enough to act.

Romance isn’t just a genre expectation, and it’s not only a love story. This is a way of thinking about the world and humanity’s place in it.

Romance is about agency and choice.

Modern romance novel readers may identify with this statement through the lens of relationships, and you would be partially correct. The relationship in a romantic novel is and should be about agency and partnership. It isn’t about one character giving over all her control to her love interest, or about the other character replacing his whole identity and sense of life for his love interest. Instead, the story is about the two of them becoming life partners together, as they are.

At some basic level, there is a recognition that something here should have its reflection in reality. And the something recognized is that human beings are not just mere victims of life or of each other. They have agency and they have choices to make, and they can achieve happiness in this world and this life when they raise themselves beyond the drudgery of limiting beliefs.

What does this mean? It means that victimhood is not and should not be your primary identity. Ever. It also means that your choices are your own.

We are still subject to forces we cannot control. That is an inescapable fact. We are subject to limitations, too. Neurodivergent people and those with extreme mental handicaps know that first-hand. Your physical and mental capabilities, economic background, and birth culture are all going to limit you somewhere and somehow. It’s not something you can legislate out of existence either, as much as you may think you can. Nor should you. Those are hurdles for the individual to overcome if they can. If not, it’s for them to learn to live with.

The romantic novel is the mere expression of this sentiment on an artistic and literary scale. If you consider The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantes was born disadvantaged. Single-parent household, low economic scale, and not a lot of economic opportunity or education for the young Dantes. But he applied himself to the opportunities that presented themselves to him. At first, that was as a merchant seaman. Then, it was as Abbe Faria’s pupil. He had agency and choice, even when it seemed like neither existed.

You can be born and raised in a repressive belief system, a slum, a bad situation, or with no advantage in the world at all, but it’s up to your own will and your own choices to get you out of it. Conditioning is only part of the equation. The rest is what you choose to do when you find out you cannot live like that anymore.

So, choose wisely.

Romance is also accepting what you cannot control.

This should be counterintuitive, but we see this repeatedly. Take American romantic novelists like Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance. Most of his characters are at the mercy of what they cannot control, whether that’s their past, their family history, or the local governing force. Translate that into a larger context and you cannot control your past, your cultural history, or what other people will do.

Romance is the great “NO” against the idea that you are a mere “victim of circumstance.” Yes, there are things you can’t change. But you do NOT have to give in to those perceptions. Because if you do, then you are only perpetuating the same cycle that birthed the situation you’re trying to escape.

For instance, in The House of Seven Gables, which deals more directly with tainted family legacies, the rest of the Pyncheons discover the land they own in Maine already had other people who had settled on it, not knowing it belonged to someone else. The Pyncheons had two choices: force them off and start another cycle like the one they’d escaped, or they could move on. They moved on and broke the cycle that had started the family drama when Colonel Pyncheon stole the land in Massachusetts by accusing Matthew Maud, its owner, of witchcraft.

So, what makes this the province of romance specifically? Well, there are two things. The first is the point I made previously: you have agency and choice. What’s past is past and you can’t change that, but you can choose what to do next. The second is that in romance, nothing is meaningless, even death.

If you accept fantasy as really a subset of Romanticism, then this is best explained by the figure of Gandalf in Moria. “What an evil fortune,” he laments when he realizes there’s a balrog in the mines. The worst part is he is the only one in the group who is powerful enough to stop it. Does he quaver? No. He doesn’t. He stands, he falls, he comes back. It’s people like Boromir and Denethor who give in to hopelessness. Denethor even postulates that it’s all pointless, not unlike other attitudes in the literary world post-WWI.

Of course, if you think of Denethor as a “hollow man” a la T. S. Eliot, then you realize just how much Lord of the Rings is a rebellion against the modernist realism that plagued the 20th century.

If you stick to the realm of realism, it is all pointless. What did WWI accomplish? It set the world up for WWII. What does life ultimately accomplish when you spend your days working to pay bills just so you can have a couple of hours on the weekend if you’re lucky? That’s the lie of nihilistic realism.

It’s a lie that entangles you in perceived reality. Not in what reality could be. So, what if your perceptions are wrong? Well, if literature like romance doesn’t challenge those perceptions, then what’s the point of literature? To wallow? To whine?

Romance is the great “NO” against perceived reality. It’s the acceptance that yes, the world can be shitty. Sometimes horrifically so. Yes, there are things you can’t change. But you do NOT have to give in to those perceptions. Because if you do, then you are only perpetuating the same cycle that birthed the situation you’re trying to escape.

Again, choose wisely. The past is unchangeable. The future is not and it cannot thrive unless you let go of the past.

Romance is worth more consideration and better artistic expression.

There are only so many sex scenes you can take before they lose their meaning. And if the novel doesn’t have much of a plot in the first place, then the sex itself is meaningless. It becomes exactly what critics of the romance genre claim it to be: porn. Not literature. This is not a fate any true romantic wants to see of their beloved genre. It’s not even a fate any romance writer should want.

Romance, whether as an art form or an idea, deserves more. It’s part of perhaps one of the longest and greatest traditions in literature and it’s high time we act like it and take pride in the art we are putting out into the world.

Otherwise, what you have is something portraying itself as art while hiding the fact that it’s garbage. The world does not flock to see a man making a mess of a canvas while wearing his underwear or to watch as someone bashes a lump of butter in the middle of the floor. It may make for a viral video, but it’s not art worth dying for.

The Mona Lisa is worth dying for. So are Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Waterhouse, and Rosetti. The world doesn’t flock to see art that makes them depressed. It flocks to see the art that makes them happy—that means something.

A couple of years ago, I went to see an exhibit of Van Gogh in St. Petersburg, FL at the Dali Museum. The exhibit basically animated Van Gogh’s works and set them to music. You had to go through the Dali gallery to get to it, so I did my due diligence and examined the Dali pieces before heading off to Van Gogh.

I will never forget the feelings I had. Ever. Dali is technically a great artist. His technique was almost flawless: minute brushstrokes, exquisite detail, and clarity of picture were in nearly every piece I saw. The only problem was what he chose to paint.

I found nothing uplifting about any of it. It didn’t make me happy; it didn’t make me want to rejoice for the beauty in the world. It was all about how ugly and absurd everything was. What was worse was that he had a good sense of color, even a good style. But instead of creating something beautiful with it, he created ugliness. It was an abomination—an affront to art itself at base.

In the Van Gogh exhibit, it was like the weight of Dali’s insane view of reality was just a nightmare. Happiness returns almost immediately. There was joy in every petal of every flower, there was peace in the fields and wonder in the starry sky. Van Gogh, as depressed as he was, at least understood happiness and loved beauty even if he didn’t feel or see it for himself.

Dali saw beauty as a joke.

So now we turn again to the state of romance in the present day. What are we creating? Are we really using our talents to their best or are we wasting them on trash, like Dali did?

Not every “spicy” romance is trash. Far from it. I’ve read some series that do an incredible job of world-building and making the story not just about a central relationship where the partners bring out the best in one another, but about the wider world or universe. The sex is there because, well, it sells, but it contributes something to the story, to the relationship, but it’s not the central point of the story.

This is what we should strive for—plot over sex. Quality over quantity. What we write and sell as romance needs to tell us something about the world that makes us believe in possibilities and challenge perceptions. Realism doesn’t do that. Gratuitous sex doesn’t do that.

The dream that was romance…

Let’s return to Rome, where we began. What made Rome great? G. K. Chesterton argued Rome was great because Rome was loved. Virgil, Ovid, Livy, Tacitus, Horace, Cicero, and so many more loved Rome. Rome was an idea and a reality to be cherished both as it was and as it could be. They didn’t relegate themselves to what was, but they allowed themselves to dream of what could be.

The dream that was Rome is now the dream that is romance. We have two hundred years of literary works in genres ranging from Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which shows romance in only the best way possible. Why are we settling for less? Romance is something beyond spice, beyond political trends, beyond tropes.

There is a time and a place for the no-brainer spicy love stories. Those no-brainer spicy love stories actually do serve a purpose, even if it’s just to make women more comfortable in their own bodies. But, of late, there are far too many no-brainer spicy love stories that sell out the romance for the sex and it’s cheapening the genre. It’s time we start making our romances more than about one relationship and definitely more than a string of sex scenes.

Our art demands no less. Our own sense of artistic ability demands no less.

For Vindico, Tutare, and Vincit, I intend to show the world more: I’m going to show what romance as a genre could be.

Post Updates

Updated to correct some spelling and revise the CTAs. Added the Substack sign-up.

March 9, 2026

Updated for grammar, and to revise the CTAs as part of a more streamlined social strategy.

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