Why I Don’t Like Romance Books

There are a lot of good reasons why I don’t read romance novels. For one thing, if there’s not a spaceship or magic spells in there somewhere, I usually get bored. For another, the tension of “will they or won’t they?” reads like a horror film to me – whereas some people are shrieking “DON’T GO IN THE BASEMENT ALONE WITH THE LIGHTS OFF!”, I’m screaming “DON’T LIE TO HER, BE EMOTIONALLY VULNERABLE AND TELL HER YOU LOVE HER!”

So I don’t read romance. That’s an entirely valid choice.

But there’s a lot of not-so-good reasons why I don’t read romance novels.

I don’t read romance novels because my Uncle Tommy had a basement full of science fiction books that he let me read at will, and he didn’t like romance. So when I was in my most formative stages, I wasn’t introduced to romance books at all, so I never got familiar with them – and a lot of my like for books is familiarity.

Then, when I was a teenager, the romance books in stores back then were coded for women – they were frilly and girly pink in the case of the Harlequins, or in the case of larger authors like Danielle Steele they were pastel colors. And when I was young and dumb I wasn’t particularly inclined to read overtly-girly books, so I skipped right past them because I knew I wouldn’t like them.

And even if I did want to read them when I was in college, my male friends gave me subtle signals about what I was or wasn’t supposed to like – their girlfriends would knit and mow through a billion interchangeable romance books, which was viewed as a little silly but a forgivable sin, whereas we mowed through endless science fiction series, which were equally as formulaic but we were somehow reading real books.

And because I didn’t read romance novels, I remained utterly unaware of how in-depth the field of romance had gotten – you hear that scream? Yes, indeed, that’s another romance reader howling at my opening paragraph, cracking their knuckles as they prepare to write a blistering comment telling me “THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF ROMANCES WITH SPACESHIPS AND MAGIC SPELLS YOU DOLT, YOU JUST DON’T SEE THEM BECAUSE YOU NEVER BOTHERED TO LOOK.”

(They are, for the record, entirely correct.)

So I don’t read romance books in part because my tastes had been shaped by outside forces that quietly redirected me, a dude, away from reading them – and those quiet redirections not only got me used to what stories “should” look like for me (i.e., “spaceships and big climactic battles”), but also made me ignorant to whole swathes of romance books that I might actually enjoy if I only tried them.

So there’s two aspects here that are slightly in conflict:

I genuinely do not like reading a lot of romance books. When friends have recommended specific romance books to me, the “will they or won’t they?” aspect actually does stress me out to the point where I can’t enjoy a lot of stories. So if I’m going to choose one of the fifty or so books I read for fun in a given year, I’ll have better odds in choosing a nonromance book.

Yet at the same time, me going out of my way to tell people “Oh, I don’t like romance books” without a greater context often is not only a staggeringly ignorant statement – because what I often mean is “I don’t like this specific brand of romance books, and I’m not sufficiently vested in the field to know that there are other kinds” – but my public statement of what I don’t like often serves as a pressure for other dudes to STAY AWAY FROM ROMANCE, FELLAS, HERE’S ANOTHER MAN INDICATING THAT ROMANCE IS NOT WHAT US BROS DO.

So there’s a careful balance to be had here:

• It’s perfectly okay for me not to want to explore a genre that I haven’t gotten much satisfaction from in the past.
• But openly STATING my distaste of a given genre often winds up passing on a bunch of unconscious biases as though they were somehow unassailable as an argument – “Hey, I like this, you can’t debate me on that one.”
• And my distaste of a genre could come just because my refusal to experiment IN that genre means that I’m ignorant of things I MIGHT like.

I say this because a lot people think that their preferences are unarguable – and that’s not just for reading! For every person who says “I don’t like YA books” or “I don’t like science fiction,” there’s someone out there saying “Fat people are unattractive” or “I could never date a trans person.”

And they get very upset when you point out that their personal taste may, in fact, be founded on some fairly ugly societal shit that they’ve quaffed down without thinking about it.

I mean, it’s okay to not like romance books! Sometimes you don’t like a thing. You’re never obliged to hold your nose and read books you hate and date people you’re not attracted to.

But if you’re going to go around sneering at romance books, then you should take a moment to ponder how much of your personal taste has been shaped by society before you go around unthinkingly propagating more of that distaste into society.

Because you might have been fed a lot of biases that lead to this dislike. And you might continue to have this dislike because you’re ignorant of how romance books actually work, and your refusal to experiment may be walling you off from new experiences.

I mean, at the end of the day, I still don’t like most romance books. But I’m willing to admit that maybe there’s a romance book or two out there that I might adore, and I keep my eyes open in case it comes along.

That’s the best any of us can do, I think.