i hate when romance novels do this

the tropes and ticks that make me wish i was never born

enjoy this random graphic that I barely had the energy to make

Like many of us, I’ve been distracted and drained. I’m working on a new Substack project that I hope to share with you soon-ish—one connected to what’s happening in the country and world.

But until then, I’ve dug up a post I wrote back in December from the trash about my most-hated romance novel tropes!

Let’s go:

I have two months to pull together this random work project that doesn’t make any sense with the help of my professional rival!

Y’all, I cannot tell you how much I do not care about these little work projects romance novel characters be doing!! First off, a lot of times they don’t make sense. “Ok, so me and Lydia are going to have to come up with a marketing plan to save her dad’s brewery and the annual July Bar Crawl Onion Festival is the PERFECT time to put this plan in action. We’ll make an Instagram reel with the two us drinking as much beer as we can, post it by next month, and set up our booth for the festival.” What? The plans never make sense to me! All of us understand this is a ploy to bring the love interests into proximity so why are we pretending to care about this marketing plan or this onion festival.

I’m not saying romances involving work are inherently uninteresting. I’m saying, work is often treated as a vehicle for the romance and therefore feels like just that.

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW (not a romance) is a great example of how work can be as compelling as the central relationship AND help propel (or hinder) the relationship.

My boss is old-fashioned and I really want this promotion. Would you pretend to be my fiancé at our work holiday party?

No. Because this is dumb. And also fuck your boss! You should get a promotion because you’re a hard worker (she’s a hard workaaaaaa).

It’s not that I don’t like fake-dating. I love fake-dating!!!! I just want a more sticky reason for doing it. Not wanting to go to your ex’s wedding alone/wanting to make them jealous at their wedding, to me, is always a safe choice. Better yet, BOTH love interests exes are going to be at the wedding so both parties have motive to fake date. In the “I want a promotion” scenario, a lot of times I’m like, so, why is the person who doesn’t need a promotion doing this? And also, is your boss not going to notice when y’all break up if this is a determining factor for them offering you a promotion? If your boss is THIS invested in your romantic life for you to feel cornered into fake dating someone, would they go so far as to revoke your promotion when you break up? Of course, the idea is that the fake dating will turn into real dating. The reader knows this but the love interests don’t! I just hate this trope lol I feel like there’s better reasons to fake date like, it’s your father’s dying wish to see you happy with someone so you do it because you love your dad or something idk, any boss who operates like the ones in these romances is a walking HR violation.

OR make the person chasing the promotion genuinely in need of the money! They have no family or financial support. Most times, these people seem like they’ll be financially fine if they don’t get this promotion or it’s like, I’ve wanted this since I was a kid. Idgaf what you’ve wanted since you were a kid!! Like, can they not pay their heating bill? Have they gotten an eviction notice? And not in a funny, “omg I’m SUCH a mess” way, like, I want to see them collapsing on a street curb to cry over this shit! I want to see the hesitant fake-dating candidate hearing the heroin groveling on the phone with the goddamn debt collector over some egregious medical bill and be like damn, I didn’t know it was this bad, what kind of person would I be if I didn’t help them? Make it so it’s life or death that they stay in their asshole boss’s good graces!

When the characters have history but it’s random and confusing. Exhibit A: that’s my best friend’s brother-in-law’s old bodyguard who I made out with when i was drunk in a 7-Eleven parking lot after our history teacher’s funeral.

WHAT? Please just make these people childhood friends or classmates or coworkers or something, why are we doing all this??? I LOVE when the love interests have history (LOVE), but not when their shared history is stupid!

“Ghost” isn’t a verb you hoes

“His lips ghosted over my skin.” NO. I love a unusual verb, great poetry is riddled with them, but y’all overdue it with this one. I have never seen this as a verb in anything but romance. And it sounds creepy! I don’t want a man’s fingers ghosting over my ass!

Let me make you jealous in every party scene even though I’m gonna go home and think about you tonight

Babe, why? You got maybe two times to kiss somebody else and make that man lose his mind, but after that we’re just playing games. It’s tew much.

I’m a crazy aLphA mAle and I do shit like stab mattresses

If you can’t tell, I’m thinking of a really specific example. This sequence actually takes place in a book I really enjoyed, but this part was just so…weird. TLDR: the heroin has moved in with her love interest who had a fiance before her. He and his ex-fiance were going to move into the house he now lives in with the heroin. The heroin doesn’t want to sleep on the bed that his former fiance picked out, even though the two never slept on it—I’m like, that’s a perfectly good mattress, but whatever, y’all got money to toss out new shit. Okay. Now. To show the heroin that he no longer gives af about his ex or the mattress they never used he stabs the shit out of it…and the heroin is like…that’s so romantic. Do you know how gone I’d be if I saw a man stabbing his mattress? Like why are you fucking up good furniture, man, just donate it.

Time to rehash the scene we just read about with the friend who's only there to propel the romance plot

Give me you edges. You don’t deserve them. I hate this. Please give your friend something else to do.

I don’t know what’s gotten into me. Why am I thinking about my best friend’s brother so much? I HATE Jared. Then why can’t you stop thinking about his hard-on, Mindy? I shake my head as if to clear it.

I will never understand this. Why are you thinking about him?!?!?!?? Because we established on page 7 that he’s a 6’4 wavy-haired Cowboy with a snake ring, a bad attitude and giant thighs made for riding horses, like, what? How does everyone but you know why you can’t stop thinking about Jared? You are a protagonist in a romance novel, you were literally invented to think about Jared. Can we please give these people more complex thoughtssss.

I can’t fuck you because I’m scared of getting hurt but I’m going to ruminate about fucking you for 150 pages and almost do it three times but also pull away at the last minute and whisper, “we can’t.”

I don’t understand how so many people in romance novels have this level of self-restraint and impulse control, like, YES, we love a slow burn, but the tension has to be both taut and have a long tail.¹ It can’t just be the heroin has daddy issues that literally 80 percent of the population has and has learned to deal with.

I ruminate about fucking you for 100 pages and when it finally happens…the scene fades to black.

This is a felony in all fifty states and the District of Columbia.

“It’s okay, I’m clean.”

ugh. There’s always a moment when the main characters are about to have barrier-free sex and one of them is like, “It’s okay. I clean.” If HIV/AIDS taught us anything, it’s that STD stigma comes with life or death consequences. Just say STI-free, people, or like, it’s cool, I’ve been tested.²

1. teehee hee

2. or you could be like, it’s fine, I have herpes, let’s get to it, to be extra subversive.