“There’s only one thing a romance book absolutely must have, with no exceptions,” my boss explained to me seriously, spreading out a bunch of the types of titles we published and sold – regency romances with dashing princes on the cover, paranormal erotica with sultry vampires and butch werewolves, and our speciality: rockstar romances with shirtless tattooed men clad in leather.
“Fucking,” I answered. “Or, you know, at least general horniness. Foreplay?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head firmly. “That’s sort of a myth. Mostly. It doesn’t hurt, I guess.”
The main rule, I was told, is that a romance book HAS to have a happily ever after. If you’re not across this trope, it’s exactly what it sounds like: the end of the book has to feature the protagonists falling in love – and not just falling in love, but at least the implied idea that they are in love for ever. There’s definitely nuance the deeper you get into it the trope – the debate about the existence and importance of “soul mates” for example being a good one. Erotica doesn’t tend to follow the “happily ever after” rule, replacing it with the innuendo laden “happy for now” instead. But as a rule, Happily Ever After is prescriptive and absolute – when you pick up a romance book, you KNOW that the couple will end up happy, and blissfully in love. It’s a guarantee.
Even after my four years doing marketing and publicity for a romance book imprint of a major publishing house, I can’t pretend to have more than a passing familiarity with the fascinating and gorgeous and sometimes remarkably silly world of romance publishing, and the massive community of authors and readers. The romance community is fascinating – often ignored, mocked, and maligned by the male-dominated literary establishment, it became a bubble, where mostly women write for other women. But it’s a huge and extremely successful bubble. It just doesn’t really need anyone else. The experiences I did have, and the lessons I managed to pick up, only made me fall more in love with it all. Maybe not a grand, happily ever after romance (I no longer work in that field), but definitely a gorgeous flirtation.
The montage of my relationship with romance and erotica publishing includes the campaign where I got to hang out with hot shirtless models who gave out free copies of one of our titles to people around the city, the hilariously boozy conferences and award nights, and watching with pride as one of our bestselling erotica authors (a middle-aged mum from Queensland) explained on stage to a panel of famous international authors, in clinical and eye-opening detail, the difference between double and dual penetration – and how one was erotica, and the other simply porn. Do NOT Google this on a work computer.
It was an incredibly fun and often strange job, but it was also weirdly juxtaposed with my own life. Every day I went out and sold novels about true love and heart-fluttering romance and also centaur-on-centaur sex (don’t ask), while also indulging in the most cynical and heartbroken period of my life, tracking the dissolution and breakup of an 11-year relationship. I didn’t just think a happily ever after was far-fetched – at that point it would have been hard to convince me of a happily ever occurring again.
Being dunked head-first into the saccharine sugary neon pink confection of romance books every day while also genuinely believing that love was a myth, that heartbreak was the only constant in a cruel and unforgiving world, was sometimes hard, sometimes hilarious.
Once during a publishing meeting (in which I had the pleasure of telling a bunch of upper management types what “pegging” was) I remember cynically describing romance books as “just fantasy, but without dragons”. Genre fiction of all types are often both beloved and criticised for being “escapism”, a way to escape the harsh realities and disappointments of our own lives, through outlandish ideas like wizards and space ships and people falling in love for ever. I remember reading a male/male military soldier erotica book that we published (incidentally, most of our male on male books were written by straight women for some bizarre reason), where lube was not only never used, it simply didn’t seem to be needed in this world. See – it was all a ridiculous fantasy. Give people their little holiday away from the truth, away from loneliness and pain, I thought.
It’s easy when you’re heartbroken to feel disillusioned about the industry of romance – the way it’s been turned into a money-making scheme, into a worldwide obsession, an aspiration. Things like Valentine’s Day, billion-dollar weddings, dating reality shows – and romance books – all seem part of a hysteria, a year-round marketing ploy to make love financial, lucrative. When you’re learning about the rules and tropes of a romance book, you realise it’s nothing more than a formula, a recipe for fictional happiness. It seems ludicrous at best, cheap at worst. If it actually worked, surely all these romance authors would be the happiest people in the world, who wouldn’t have time to write books about love, because they’d be too swept up in their own grand romance.
I guess the moral is don’t read romance books when you’re heartbroken. I’d recommend true crime, the genre that reminds the heartbroken that things could be much worse.
My own heartbreak came from a realisation that the romance I was in didn’t have a happy ever after, despite the fact that I really wanted it to and thought it would. I thought that I was following a set of rules that would ultimately lead to happiness. I think, add or subtract some plot specifics, that’s what a lot of breakups come down to.
It’s also why I think we love romance books . We love them purely because real life romance doesn’t have one rule, and it doesn’t have a formula, a recipe. It’s more mysterious, more exciting, more strange than that. It’s also scarier – because at any point you could be let down again. But it’s why we’re so obsessed with love, and why we reflect it in all our art and literature. It’s why, as a treat, we sand the hard edges off in romance books, and enjoy a depiction of a love that will never let you down. All the benefits of being in love (feeling great, being obsessed with someone, having someone to help you do the Wordle) but none of the terrifying lack of certainty.
When I think about it, I realise the only real fantasy that romance books peddle (apart from the whole lube thing) is the idea of a guaranteed happily ever after, the certainty, the fact that when we start dating someone they are the one for ever. That certainty would be so nice, so easy.
What romance books tap into is the intoxicating hope, the belief that when we open up a new chapter – as I eventually did, years after my time in the industry – that this time we’ll find happiness. They reiterate, which I truly believe, that even though it’s a risk, if you find the right person, it’s worth it.