From Jane Austen to Wattpad, romance is the most popular genre worldwide, particularly among women. But what does its global dominance say about the emotional economies we inhabit?
They say that romance is the softest of genres – a guilty pleasure, a mass-market fantasy, a paperback daydream sold by the million. Yet it remains the hardest to kill.
Year after year, love stories outsell every other category in publishing, generating more than a billion pounds annually and accounting for almost one in every four books sold.
Behind the glossy covers and the chivalrous heroes lies a cultural paradox: if women are so often ridiculed for reading romance, why can’t they stop buying it?
Perhaps because the pages of a romance novel promise what the world often withholds: to be seen without performing, to be chosen without condition, to rest inside someone’s certainty.
In print, women can savour the feeling of being loved deliberately, without needing to earn it. In contemporary society, where so much weight is placed on the importance of women being ‘self-sufficient’ and ‘independent’ to the point of solitude, romance offers something far more subversive: dependence without shame.
Romance as a genre is often dismissed as ‘silly, sentimental fluff’, never taken seriously – yet it is, at its core, a multi-billion-pound industry, built significantly on female imagination.
Its continued dominance within the field of publishing reveals something telling about the economy of women’s unmet needs. To understand truly why romance sells, look beyond just the books themselves and at what women are searching for inside them.
What women buy when they buy love
When I asked 21-year-old romance reader, Niharika Das, what draws her to romance as a genre, she revealed that it was “the intensity it holds.” She started reading romance at 16, and has stayed with it since. “It’s exciting and keeps me on my toes,” she said. “Reading romance has definitely changed my expectations. My standards are higher now – I know what I need in my love life.”
Her insight might sound like idealism, but it’s also data. Several studies reveal that approximately 82% to 84% of regular romance readers are women, and almost half are under the age of 35 – a demographic likely to feel disillusioned by the concepts of modern dating.
Romance, for them, has become less about the fantasy of ‘love’, and more about emotional pedagogy – a way of learning, through fiction, what it could feel like.
“What I find in books that I don’t find in real life is the level of understanding without any judgment and grudges held, it’s the concept of fighting with the problem, rather than fighting with each other,” said Das.
In an age of half-typed replies and almost-relationships, consistent, attentive love has become aspirational. Romance novels don’t just sell ‘love’; they sell the idea of being fully met – of care returned in equal measure.
The female gaze: an economic tool
Delilah Smith, 33, who has been consuming romance since childhood, believes that the men in these stories are tailored to what women wish they behaved like. “It’s about the female gaze,” she said. “Everyone likes to be loved and know what it is like to be loved; romance as a genre supplies that.”
In literature, as in life, the female gaze is rarely taken seriously, yet it’s what built contemporary publishing industries. Romance is no longer a genre on the periphery; it is the financial backbone of mainstream storytelling.
For Smith, the appeal of romance fiction doesn’t just lie in what the story offers, but in how it makes her feel. “Reading romance is like experiencing the first few stages of a relationship, and all the butterflies and the ups and downs that come with it,” she said.
That is to say, romance as a genre doesn’t just stimulate love; it recreates its physiology, neuroscience, and biological essence. And perhaps more importantly, it does so without permission, without shame, without apology.
“It allows women to be themselves and want what they want, whether that’s a man or not,” she added. “That is something society has a hard time offering women.” In a society that so often polices female longing, ridiculing it as ‘dependence’ or ‘delusion’, romance as a genre offers something defiant: “a safe space to feel something real without being judged for that feeling.”
When observed through this lens, the female gaze isn’t ‘soft’ – it’s subversive. It insists that women’s desires, whether erotic or emotional, are not only worth documenting but worth publishing, sharing, and centring.
The inheritance of longing: from Jane Austen to Wattpad
When Jane Austen first published Sense and Sensibility in 1811, the author’s credit only read “By a Lady.”
This anonymity wasn’t modesty – it was survival. Women who wrote romance publicly significantly risked being seen as ‘indecent’ – to put their wit and wants on display was to step outside the bounds of ‘acceptable femininity’.
When Austen first published her novels anonymously, the idea that romance could sustain an entire industry would’ve seemed absurd. Yet today, the desires she documented have grown into a multi-billion-pound empire.
From Pride and Prejudice to BookTok, women’s longing has proven itself to be not only narratively enduring, but economically inexhaustible – a market that keeps growing precisely because reality still hasn’t managed to catch up to fantasy.
The same emotional architecture that Austen perfected – yearning, restraint, the promise of recognition – continues to bankroll the publishing industry.
The settings may have shifted, from drawing rooms to digital feeds, but female longing remains unchanged: to be seen, chosen, cherished. Romance has outlasted every literary movement that has attempted to dismiss it, becoming the foundation of global publishing.
Two centuries later, however, the same impulse, to shy under the shame tied to female desire, has gone digital. The women who once hid in print, behind initials and pseudonyms, now do the same digitally, on platforms like Wattpad, under usernames and aliases. Their stories still pulse with Austen’s inheritance: longing filtered through structure, yearning protected through fiction.
One 28-year-old Wattpad writer revealed that she chooses to publish her work anonymously because, for her, anonymity isn’t shame – it’s protection: “It felt easier to be vulnerable when no one knew it was me. I leave so much of myself in what I write, I don’t know if I can let everyone in my life know me so deeply.”
Why does she choose to write romance? “It gives me control over how a story ends, which is very different to how love plays out in real life.” For her, writing romance isn’t just about escapism or fulfilling a fantasy – it’s about authorship. Writing lets her decide when love stays, when it fails, and when it finally feels safe.
Her words capture something deeper – not just the desire of ‘happy ever after’, but the endurance of wanting it all. In Austen’s time, women’s longing translated to irony, but now, it lives in bookshelves, as well as algorithms and comment sections.
Regardless of the decade or physical terrain, the impulse remains unchanged – the need to write desire into being, to keep it alive somewhere, if not in life, then in language.
In contemporary society, romance readers come to Wattpad for “the fantasy of love. The fantasy of a ‘happy ever after.’ The fantasy of consistency. Above all, the fantasy of being chosen. Of being enough,” she said.
“There’s a shortage of belief in ‘happy ever afters,’ she insists. “Even when I write ‘realistic’ life, people have a hard time believing it can exist for them in real life. That’s quite heartbreaking.”
“All love is real, even the one in pages,” she said. “The characters might not be real, but the love is.” For her, romance as a genre goes beyond just fantasies and escapism. “It’s given me a deeper appreciation for the beauty of loving and being loved, and everything else that comes with it. There is truly nothing more beautiful this world has to offer than love.”
When asked what she wanted her readers to feel when they close her romance novels to end, she simply said, “loved, and inspired to love.”
In this light, romance isn’t naivety – it’s resistance. To keep believing in love, in an age that keeps disappointing you romantically, is an act of defiance in itself. Perhaps that’s what the inheritance of female longing is: not just the desire to be loved, but the refusal to stop imagining it.
Fantasy or feminism?
The feminist discomfort with romance is one with a long history. Several second-wave critics see romance novels as a tool of patriarchal indoctrination – a genre that teaches women to want the very structures that oppress them.
One of these critics, Germaine Greer, has, on several occasions, expressed her discomfort with romance novels on account of them promoting the myth of an ‘ideal man’ and an unrealistic dream life, which, she argues, kept women emotionally and intellectually in bondage.
In her 1970 book, The Female Eunuch, she describes romance readers as “women cherishing the chains of their own bondage,” believing that these novels trap women in subservient roles. But contemporary feminism has grown more nuanced.
Writers like Roxane Gay, Jia Tolentino, and Rebecca Traister have begun to reframe the question: what if women aren’t duped by fantasy, but in control of it?
Romance today, especially in digital spaces, isn’t about waiting to be chosen – it’s about choosing the narrative. Fanfiction, Wattpad, BookTok, etc. have democratised desire. Women can now write and read stories that reflect their deepest desires and fantasies – as opposed to those imposed on them.
For London-based author Saz Vora, writing romance grew out of something deeply personal. After losing her first child, and navigating the life-long clash between her Gujrati heritage and British upbringing, she turned to fiction writing as a way of making sense of her identity, grief, and belonging.
“My topics are heavy,” she said, “but I always want my characters to find hope. I like happy endings – not perfect ones, but ones where people learn to accept themselves.”
Her stories centre on South Asian women who exist beyond neatly-boxed stereotypes or gender roles – they’re complicated, headstrong, and unapologetically and emotionally real.
“I read women’s fiction a lot,” Saz told me, “but when I started writing, it felt like this was where I should be. Love moves people from even the darkest places – but you can’t move forward until you love yourself.”
The way Saz presents it, romance is an undeniable pillar of feminist infrastructure – not because it restores faith, but because it redistributes power.
The market of the heart
The genre of romance has also started to mirror cultural shifts within society – the white, heteronormative templates of love are sharing space with queer love stories, interracial couples, and narratives centred around consent, communication, and trauma.
As the genre grows more inclusive, it also grows more deliberate – and more marketable. Publishers now package desire into tiers of “spicy romances” and market heartbreak and intensity as “sad girl lit”.
Yet, beneath all this branding, the feminine longing remains unchanged: “Reading romance makes love feel attainable,” said Smith. “It reminds me that love is worth a lot in life.”
That word – attainable – is of the essence here. Contrary to popular belief, romance fiction doesn’t sell because women are ‘dependent’, ‘delusional’, or ‘naive’; it sells because it offers the emotional fluency that is still rare in the real world, one where care is instinctive, and attention has texture. In print, a woman’s desire is central, not peripheral. It’s not about the love story itself, it’s about the emotional literary inside it.
To read a romance novel is, therefore, in many ways, a protest. Against the performance of composure. Against the worship of independence. Against the quiet erasure of need.
Love and literacy
As a genre, romance has always been mislabeled as escapism when, in fact, it’s been instruction all along: a syllabus for feeling.
In Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, the protagonist breaks a generational cycle of abuse. In Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient, neurodivergent desire is explored with tenderness and humour.
In Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, the book Das named as her ‘ideal love story’, love transcends tragedy through devotion. These are not escapist fairy tales; they’re emotional case studies, centred in grief, longing, and choice.
In Dangerous Books for Girls, Maya Rodale wrote: “Romance novels feature nuanced portrayals of female characters having adventures, making choices, and accepting themselves as they are. When we say these stories are silly and unrealistic, we are telling young girls not to expect to be the heroines in their own real lives.”
When examined through her lens, romance as a genre isn’t passive; it’s political. “When a woman reads a romance novel, she is putting her own pleasure first. That small act of rebellion is perceived as a threat to the status quo. It’s also why this eternally popular and profitable genre has been scorned, ridiculed and dismissed,” she stated.
The derision aimed at romance reveals less about the books themselves and more about society’s inability to take women’s desires seriously, as legitimate subjects of art and creation.
Beyond just pleasure and imagination, romance acts as a muscle for inviting social change: “Women create an idealised, hopeful vision for the future to inspire other women. Fiction and fantasy are the crucial first steps to changing the world,” Rodale wrote. If politics imagines systems, then romance imagines care – and maybe that’s exactly why, despite everything, it keeps selling.
Belief, belonging, and the business of desire
Every time a woman reaches for a romance novel on a bookshelf, she’s not just seeking escape – she’s rehearsing a blueprint. She purchases not just a love story, but a reminder of possibility: that her desires can be attained, her dreams sustained, and love made possible.
That belief – fragile, commodified, endlessly reinterpreted – is what the industry runs on. Across lined chapters, online uploads, and midnight e-reads, it’s also what keeps many of us going.
The business of desire, in essence, isn’t just about profit margins or publishing trends. It’s about women re-writing the language of love – on their own terms.
Women aren’t just turning pages; they’re writing the parameters of what love should feel like, admission after admission, read after read.
And that’s why romance keeps selling: because until the rest of the world catches up, fiction doesn’t just reflect desire – it choreographs it.
Featured image taken by Anusha Aggarwal.