Love’s Work
The Generic Pleasures of Romance
Anna Kornbluh
Photo by Roberta Sant’Anna
Before it was a fantasy teaching us how to desire, romance was a genre. A genre of twelfth-century narrative derived from epic poetry, chivalric romances wove allegorical adventures and magical enchantments of mythical archetypal heroes with some strands of tribal, royal, and protonational history—all for the pleasure of the leisured at court. Pleasure is paramount for literary theorist Northrop Frye’s definition of romance, as wish fulfillment: “[T]he quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfilment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality.” After romance’s mixing of reality with the marvelous morphs into the modern mode of the novel (a hybrid comic epic of ordinary extraordinariness that harkens toward romance’s Other, “realism”), in accounts encompassing those of structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marxists like Fredric Jameson, and belles-lettres psychoanalytic critics like Peter Brooks, wish fulfillment still remains a darling critical explanation for how narrative gratifies.
Any psychoanalytic consideration of romance today—its surging popularity, its place in our political libidinal economy of love and work—should first draw upon this inheritance, this primacy of genre. Psychoanalysis proves nothing if not that guys have a type; object-choice typification, sorting, and the repressed identity of opposites are all primary psychic operations and psychoanalytic concerns. When an analysand presents a romantic entanglement, she speaks in genre; when a celebrity divorce dominates the headlines, it circulates genre; when cultural critics register sex negativity as pervasive malady, they long for genre. The capacious psychoanalytic corpus of reflections on ancient tragedy, classical epic, courtly drama, uncanny tales, literary realism, jokes, and Joycean signifiers instantiates psychoanalysis as a practice of punctuating clinical speech and interpreting cultural aesthetics, a practice that is facilitated not just by familiarity with the poetics of condensation, displacement, allegory, and dramatization, but also by literacy in genre. We work through common frames.
Classical genre classifications like epic, tragedy, comedy, the lyric, satire, and chivalric romance involve formal typologies (the happy ending, the situation of the speaker, hyperbole), while contemporary classifications like romance, horror, and sci-fi connote consumer preferences just as much as, or more than, formal features. For this reason, and because the mass culture market cultivates those preferences, such classifications have usually been studied as the product of institutions and hierarchies more than as descriptions of existing forms. “Genre fiction,” for example, is in this sense that domain of lucrative cultural production which doesn’t conventionally score the recognition of “literary fiction.” Such purely sociological attributions bungle what psychoanalytic criticism caresses: genre pleasures differ from non-genre pleasures. Pleasure from difference, novelty, the unexpected, and deferral stroll one side of kinky avenue; pleasure from sameness, againness, the expected, and satiation retread the other.
Through its very sameness, genre normativizes, and the modern romance genre imparts fantasies of how to desire, normatively tying love, intimacy, and genital sexual passion up with a red satin negligee bow. In antithesis to Freud’s revolutionary insight that all sexuality is abnormal, romance vows that it is possible to be relieved from the clumsy idiocy of sex through the intimate congress of love. Breathless whispers: everything can be normal if you swoon openly hard enough. Romance is everyone finding the One.
If this is fantasy, reality roosts in the realm of deliberate cultural practice, the pursuit of pleasures more conscious than unsaid desires, and consumer habits in the marketplace of ideas. Satisfaction guaranteed: romance as genre tenders repetitive aesthetic enjoyment, the certain fulfillment of aroused expectations. Classifying a work as part of a genre is a defense against unexpected aesthetic experiences. Only the thrill of boy meeting girl. Readers know what they’re going to get, it is not new, and they get off still, and again. Getting a certain stimulation is at the center of the film theorist Linda Williams’ famed account of “body genres”: melodrama makes tears, pornography makes arousal, horror makes fright. As a heart genre, romance enrobes such bodily response in mythic history: it makes union. In the words of one 2021 romance bestseller, People We Meet on Vacation, “Tomorrow, we will love each other a little more, and the next day, and the next day. And even on those days when one or both of us is having a hard time, we’ll be here, where we are completely known, completely accepted, by the person whose every side we love wholeheartedly.” The union plays in infinite series; Freud relays, in “Concerning a Particular Type of Object-choice in Men,” that “the notion of something irreplaceable in the unconscious often announces its presence by breaking down into an infinite series—infinite because no surrogate possesses the required satisfaction.” Thus reading romance is finding the One—and then another One. Then another One. And then another.
“In antithesis to Freud’s revolutionary insight that all sexuality is abnormal, romance vows that it is possible to be relieved from the clumsy idiocy of sex through the intimate congress of love.”
Mark the divergence between this genre pleasure and other, more philosophically esteemed aesthetic pleasures. Decidedly not the avant-garde aesthetic pleasures of novelty or breaking, not the modernist pleasures of shock and catharsis, not the critical pleasures of estrangement and wonder, the pleasures of genre and romance are the smooth operators of recurrence and relief, certainty. So unlike life, this smoothness swoons on the weft for expectations and the warp of their fulfillment, pleasure with insurance. The romance formula follows Freud’s math: sex + obstacles = love. Heroine meets hero, ridges rise, obstacles intervene, emotional intensity flares, obstacles are overcome, emotional intensity crests, happily ever after. When we read so many romances, we are not reading for the surprise of the nonformulaic, we are reading for the confirmation of the formula, for content of the obstacles, for specific details (setting, jokes, euphemisms for cunnilingus) bedding what we already know will happen. Again. We repeat aesthetic pleasure, we repeat as aesthetic pleasure, because repetition is a—the—truth of psychic life.
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We have ourselves right here a story of psychoanalysis fingering the two genres of aesthetic pleasure: repetition and innovation. And we also have ourselves right now a mystery of industry: at this precise world historical conjuncture, a wildly expanded demand for romance. People (including young people) are presently reading romance at all-time high levels, much-touted end of mass literacy be damned. In a radical uptick, US print sales of romance novels more than doubled from 2020 to 2023, from eighteen million copies to thirty-nine; and in 2024 the genre grew another ten percent—a rate of growth more than twice that of the rest of the fiction market (according to The New York Times’ synthesis of Circana Bookscan data). And these numbers only tally officially published books from official points of sale; used books, library books, festival sales, and the self-publishing empire of Kindle Direct and WattPad paint a staggering picture of romance consumption.
To be sure, on the long tail of a very old genre transcending mode and media, modern romance has forever enjoyed majority appeal in the mass market, besting genres like horror and mystery: Danielle Steel alone has written nearly 200 novels since the 1970s (for the past decade she’s been producing seven per year, so these counts will be out of date within days of publication), with total sales over 800 million copies. In recent years, though, sensation Colleen Hoover has outsold J. K. Rowling, James Patterson, Stephen King, and John Grisham combined—even outpacing the Bible. In a slightly different tier of both social media stratosphere and aesthetic quality, Emily Henry has written six romance novels in five consecutive years, each of which has become a New York Times bestseller. That no title from either of these two authors appears on the recent list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (according to The New York Times) underscores how stringently genre pleasures continue to be distinguished from non-genre pleasures. For a touchstone more copacetic to the NYT, though, consider the decidedly literary, decidedly romance novelist Sally Rooney: four prize-winning novels have sold millions and millions of copies, in forty-six languages, despite occupying a tranche that usually tops out at 5,000. Something horny this way comes.
The sheer magnitude of these romance enthusiasms—up to and including the seduction of literary fiction, to say nothing of their fandoms and prolific websites touting “The Spicy Chapters: Your Guide to the Hottest Moments” in every new release—attests to a libidinal phenomenon we psychoanalytic culture critics need to be able to interpret. Why do we want it so much now? Psychoanalysis is not not a historical materialism, and with wish fulfillment the old faithful frame, we can inlay the current embrace of romance genre pleasure into the contingent specificity of the 2020s, foremost the global coronavirus pandemic. In the wake of mass death and governmental abandonment, happy endings are salve. Domestic bliss soothes in domestic peril, from the shadow pandemic of sharply increased domestic abuse to the intensified offloading of social reproduction onto individual harried moth ers. The broader historical shitshow the pandemic symptomatizes—an omnicrisis of cascading climate calamities and attendant daily threats to the basic security of food, water, and shelter alongside regnant global authoritarianism and its attendant segregationism and ethnic extermination; the resultant contagion of depression, anxiety, and sex negativity—is yet more context for our ubercontemporary orgy of romance. The domestic is a hazmat zone, the fundamental project of growing human beings under manifold assault. Steady, reliable, ongoing pleasure sounds like a pretty good principle. What’s love, but a secondhand emotion? Such sociological wishing is in keeping with the still most influential academic study of the romance genre, Janice Radway’s 1984 ethnography Reading the Romance. Romance licenses women to take a break from domestic labor and secure privacy in a “declaration of independence,” as a woman Radway interviewed told her: not now, honey, mommy’s reading, get yourself a snack. As the drudgery of social reproduction takes the shine off heteronormative sexuality, the romance genre lubricates. Forty years later, the extremizing of domestic work through the destruction of the welfare state, responsibilization of individual families, and pandemic emergency deeply kindle the romance boom.
But since psychoanalytic critics can also explore genre pleasure beyond wish fulfillment or askance of the intractable distraction theses on mass culture—since we can conceive genre pleasure as essential repetition—contemporary romance in all its sociological specificity might solicit another interpretation. After all, we have to admit that the recent romance surge pads flextime more than scullery strikes: women’s magazines today regularly trumpet the utility of audiobooks for enhancing, rather than escaping, laundry, vacuuming, meal prep, and grocery unloading. And if we actually read the best books in the boom, we can hear them speak the wonders of love articulated not against but to the repetitious routines of work. Maybe romance readers are not plugging a hole so much as tracing its rim, finding a way to enjoy dissatisfaction. Is it so bad to lack and to repeat?
“Twelfth-century romance was a genre and twentieth-century romance was a fantasy of desire, but twenty-first-century romance is a melancholia of work.”
Lack is imprinted in romance by the aesthetic acme of its recent renaissance, the politically-infused Rooney oeuvre. Girlfriend plots and steamy sex come laced with sociopolitical awareness and the admission that love cannot repair the world. Tender musings in Conversations with Friends sound like “the universe itself would eventually experience heat death.” Crescendos of realization propel Connell’s rich interiority in Normal People: “foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.” In Intermezzo, Peter quips at the expanding solidarity between his two loves, “My girlfriends have unionised.” Rooney’s autofictional persona in Beautiful World, Where Are You relativizes romance writing: “Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter?” Acknowledging that class is in the boudoir or that libidinal fulfillment quests are simultaneously more stupid and more essential at the end of the world, Rooney’s novels auto-contextualize the genre boom: as jazz guitarist Tiny Grimes had it, “romance without finance is a nuisance.”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that writing sex scenes is tricky. If the literary fiction tradition from which Rooney hails usually omits them, that’s surely to the benefit of the prose. Romance fiction, on the other hand, leans into the genericity of throbbing members and quivering thighs, to the inherent repetitiveness of sex. Hovering above the intermezzo between Rooney’s Wittgenstein allusions and all the Harlequin bodices, Emily Henry’s novels roundly pursue the expected:
My thighs go hot and liquid at the texture of his skin.
He lifts his arms and lets me push the shirt over his head, leaving his chest bare in the mix of soft candlelight and the lantern’s harsh glow. “I wish I could see you better,” I whisper, letting my hands move down him now that the shirt’s out of the way.
“Me too.” His voice is low and hoarse. Gingerly, he pulls me back to him, our bodies melding together. The low sound that moves through him makes my blood vessels start singing. The pressure between my thighs builds into an ache.
What is unexpected, what weds Henry to Rooney despite their different literary status and style, is the way all of Henry’s romances embed passionate love within the professional travails of the creative class. Her first book features nothing other than a romance novelist overcoming writer’s block by engorging a literary novelist; the second ties a travel writer to an English teacher; the third, a literary agent and book editor; the fourth, probably the weakest (Goodreads Best Romance of 2023 award notwithstanding), tracks the career troubles of an unfulfilled medical resident-turned-potter and a profession-less odd-jobber with a heart of gold; the fifth, a librarian and a culinary creative at a winery; the sixth, two journalists competing to land the same big story. The wishes fulfilled here are canonical romance—a lover whose open eyes and big arms fill the holes of origin-family losses (sick sisters and dead parents abound in the EmHen universe)—and they are canonical romance genre pleasure: “You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read” (2022’s Book Lovers). Strikingly, they turn on a specifically 2020s twist: they fill other holes, those of educated, generally writerly professionals longing for stable, rewarding, generative work. The exact creative workers we were told we had to be to drive the twenty-first century. The exact creative workers ruthlessly wrecked by recent years of ballooning student debt, private equity pillaging, authoritarian assaults, and AI bubble grift. In this way they become not nostalgic for magic and myth à la old romance, but historically conscious, à la the realist novel.
Turning the perfect sentence, cracking a life story’s mystery, meeting a news deadline, or mastering a new genre are these novels’ professional simultaneous climaxes. Frequently the amorous creatives share a subfield, industry, or workplace, laminating longing for HR-less love at work. The repetitive pleasures of the romance genre poignantly pique the repetitive rhythm of workaday creative careers. Twelfth-century romance was a genre and twentieth-century romance was a fantasy of desire, but twenty-first-century romance is a melancholia of work. Henry’s newest, Great Big Beautiful Life, elevates the protagonists’ creative work through an ambitious structure of alternation, presenting their romance interspersed with passages from their work project, a cultural history of a newspaper family. The two stories share the creative lesson that love is worldbuilding: “For the one you love? Anything. You unmake the world and build a new one.” The ultimate union of the couple is the ultimate creative solution to their professional rivalry: Alice and Hayden coauthor.
“Writer” always sounds like a glamorous job, though most writers agree there’s no secret but butt-in-the-chair, shitty-first-draft, grind-it-out essential routine. You have to open the document and you have to move your fingers, again, get it out, shape it up, and then bloody murder the darlings. “With writing, you could always add more,” Alice tells us. “More, more, more, until you got to the heart of a thing, and after that, you could chip away the excess.” Adding and chipping, revising and regenerating: the rhythmic fort and da. A stately garden path in the novel becomes a recurrent governing image for its theory of narrative: “[U]nicursal. There’s only one path in and out. It’s not quite the game of a maze. You can’t get lost. You just walk the path, and it won’t be the shortest way to get where you’re going, but you’ll wind up in the center . . . Unicursal. One beginning, one end. Or, depending on how you look at it, no beginning and no end—just a journey.” The way Henry prosaically, funnily marries the pleasures of repetitious reading to the pleasures of repetitious writing opens a generative sublimation, a vision of the entwined possibilities of love and work and circuitous unicurses. Of course, neither romantic love nor creative industry constitute the collective action requisite for omnicrisis redress, but amalgamated they model some stable repetitive pleasures to be won, should we be bold enough to unite against degradation, disaffection, and deskilling. Genre pleasure, taken in genres of the good life: repeating, rehearsing, repeating again, for the movement.