In the Austen tradition, the marriage plot is a story construct designed around two individuals destined to marry. Courtship is never a linear path, but the destination is a well-paved inevitability.
I’ve been working on this one for a while, because there’s nothing quite like the comfort of the romance genre. This one is about the defensibility of the genre, a dearth of leading love interests, romance podcast english classes, and logical girls that live for the messiness of a fictional romance.
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a few leading men
The spring brought a stunning revival of the period-adjacent romance as Bridgerton made its debut for a sophomore season. The second season of Bridgerton works not because of the sweeping diaphanous gowns or the high-pitched pop string quartets—but because it respects the genre it was borne from. The season centers on a nemeses-to-lovers plot between family patriarch Anthony Bridgerton (played by classically trained theatre actor, Jonathan Bailey, and his background in theatre explains all) and combative heroine Kate Sharma (played by Simone Ashley, an absolute revelation in the role). It’s a love story that’s more about the when will they? than the will they or won’t they?
The singular, most spectacular aspect of Jonathan Bailey’s performance is how he understands the gravity of playing a leading man in the romance genre. He doesn’t sneer at it or regard the character as beneath him. He takes his role as seriously as he would if he were debuting an avant-garde play on the West End. There’s a gravitational pull in his artistic sincerity, which gives his performance the weight it needs to transcend the patent frivolity. His British stage-actor-turned-television-actor professional upbringing is evident in the ruinous expressiveness of his facial features. There is tension and terror in his eyes; sparkles of agony and affection that simmer. His face crumples in multiple scenes—“crumples” as one of those phrases someone sees in writing and doesn’t understand how it maps to the plane of a human face—but is then visualized so profoundly in quiet moments of devastation.
He is a romantic lead, and he gets it. He gets it as clear as day, down to the details; the character equivalent of Matthew Macfadyen’s hand flex in 2005. Most actors take a romance role for the paycheck, but rarely out of respect or reverence for the source material. It shows. The leads become cardboard cutouts of an attractive human meets another attractive human, and so goes the superficial charisma of putting two attractive people next to each other on a film camera. It’s all terribly stale, and it’s why people think their performances are stale and hardly noteworthy, and also why the genre itself is deemed frothy and meaningless. What made the second season of Bridgerton work as an object of cultural obsession, far and wide through the reaches of the internet, was the self-aware seriousness of the emotional beats needed to tell the story. The hating and longing; the self-loathing and denial; the fury and infatuation. It was the romance of it all. It’s what made it so consuming to watch—knowing they were just as consumed too.
emotional logic puzzles
The romance genre makes complete sense. The genre is long-ridiculed for its saccharine camp, as if it were completely foolish to watch two people fall in love (over, and over, again). Also, girls love romcoms; and god forbid girls like anything as unserious and asinine as romance—and there’s nothing less serious than people navigating the complicated landmine of human love.
Logical girls love romcoms. Romcoms contradict the regimen of regulated emotion and compartmentalized feelings of the real world, and let loose in the structured chaos of a fictional one. The Greeks internalized this contradiction in the art of theatre, where the stage purged all the dark impulses of the audience and mask-donning actors played out the fantasy of a hypothetical. All the world’s a stage. A romance film is a tightly structured container of explosive, disastrous feelings. Endless angst and self-contrived obstacles stand in the way to contentment. Spending two-hours immersed in this fantasy is a cathartic exercise, a purge of someone else’s problems and predicaments.
There’s something to logic out of the mired pit of messy human emotion that swells. Love as that elusively universal thing that seems impossible to make sense of, but these stories are practice runs of tragic trials and comedic errors. It’s watching two people make mistakes and feel things and dig themselves out of their stubbornness to find something greater than themselves. It’s watching two ignorantly-destined individuals circle around each other even when there is a clearly charted course they could take. There is an alluring comfort in the predictability. These genres are how the hyper-logical exercise control over the uncertainty of human relationships. The people onscreen always figure it out too.
Watching a romcom is putting together a puzzle in movie-time; there’s no mystery to the final picture, just the challenge of finding the right combination of pieces. The genre tropes are a rolodex of possibility—some more probable than others—that lay out paths along a logic tree that converge to a common point: happily ever after. Every look and line imparts new directional clues, filed away in a sociological reference book of how people act under emotional distress. Nothing is wasted in a romantic plot. Every action has a corresponding reaction; read enough romance novels and eventually the characters and situations write themselves. When we senselessly categorize the human condition as a mechanism of simplification, the romance cliches offer a guidebook. It’s how we read people in between the lines of our self-inflicted nonsense. It’s what I love most, I think.
in defense of the genre
Romance bears new armor and a battalion of devoted mainstream consumers. There are broader macro-publishing trends at play, such as the lawless surge of BookTok that has catapulted the reading preferences of young women into the Bestseller’s list. Chart-dominating hits, lining the pockets of the publishing industry, simply about people in love. This TikTok understands that when laid bare, the romance genre is just a contemporary high fantasy about real-life, because real-life is so disappointing in comparison. It’s escapist, yet profoundly real and human at the same time. It expresses sentiments about the human condition and the desire to be treasured, cared for, longed after that’s missing in contemporary discourse. At long last, the genre has defenders.
I started thinking about this because I took the misinformed recommendation of the Goodreads Best Books list (okay, so I don’t actually learn from my mistakes) and read Emily Henry’s Beach Read. It was January and I was craving a reminder of warm summers. This book exploits the trauma plot, mines it for every bit of the conflict catalysis and miscommunication its worth, and resolves by disemboweling their main leads of any personality. As in, they are not people aside from their orientation and reaction to their trauma. The meta-point is that this is a romance novel wherein the main character is a romance novelist and she fervidly defends her craft. Rachel Lynn Solomon’s Today, Tonight, Tomorrow did something similar with its graduating high school senior-slash-aspiring romance novelist protagonist. There’s even a scene where she attends a book reading of her favorite romance novelist and is encouraged to read the first chapter of her own fiction by the love interest.
It’s the problem I have with writers who insert writers (aspiring, burnt out, retired, etc) as their leads. The romance genre didn’t need to turn sentient. Romance novelists didn’t need to insert romance authors as characters in their book to offer an air of legitimacy to the production and conception of these works. But to explain it outright to their own readers is simply a pick-me sign of trying to hard. They were loved, are loved, by readers who aren’t ashamed to lose themselves in another love story; maybe they’re waiting in the wings for their own.
1-800-romcoms
This New York Times space described the romance novel as one where love is not the cotton-candy guarantee, but rather, “love is the antagonist.” Love works against these characters. They have to make choices for love, in spite of love, because of love. Not everyone has had to make these same choices, but to say these aren’t the most confounding choices we are faced with in our ordinary human lives is a bold-faced lie. There’s simply so much to unpack here.
One of my favorite past-times is listening to romance podcasts; there’s nothing better than a grocery store trip or weekend deep clean accompanied by a round table discussion about a romance novel. Fifty Percent’s inaugural episode about Emily Henry’s Book Lovers is a good gateway. Listening in is something akin to a wine moms book club meets end-of-year year high school English class where everyone gets to read the books they actually wanted to read. The care and attention with which podcasters unravel the relationship and story beats is the form usually reserved for higher forms of art. To find deeper meaning and appreciation for a story after it’s told—is that not why culture persists? To continue to revisit these characters and the ups and downs on their way to happily ever after; to have loved them so much that we get to stay a little longer in their world.
It’s the joy of analyzing unserious things as if they were quite serious. Intellectualization of romance novels for the analytical brain. It’s made me a better study of characters and story as a result. I’ve understood these characters better through the critical lens of their personal history and behavior patterns. If classic novels are worthy of analysis through the literary gaze (for every Austen, Bronte, or Tolstoy novel that gets lauded for its transgressive renderings of character relationships), then there’s a stack of contemporary novels at the Barnes & Noble bookshelf in lack of similar praise.
If we insist on taking the romance genre seriously, then we must also take its concepts and characters just as easily. Love stories merit literary analysis, too. They are deeper, more meaningful probes of fictional people in some of the most vulnerable, compromising positions of their lives. I can tell you so much about these characters in the scenarios where they come together and fall apart. These are the tales where we want to spend more time, because the marriage plot gave us love, against all odds, in a hopeless place. We tell ourselves stories in order to live and these stories are the truest reflection of the lives we dare to hope to lead. All fiction is nothing but a big bag of tropes, but love stories always play new tricks.