Here is something the book publishing industry has known for decades that the rest of the world is only just catching up to: Women are absolutely ravenous for romance. Not in a wistful, embarrassed way. In a voracious, deliberate, I-read-three-books-this-week-and-I-will-do-it-again way.
Romance novel sales grew by 52% in 2023, making it the fastest-growing genre of fiction and the highest-earning category in publishing. Over 78% of romance readers finish more than one novel a month. The readership skews younger with every passing year, driven largely by BookTok, where the romantasy hashtag alone has racked up hundreds of millions of views.
And yet, for years, romance was the genre people apologised for loving. You hid the cover on the train. You described it as a "guilty pleasure." You felt the need to clarify that you also read literary fiction, as if the two were somehow incompatible. That era is over, and good riddance.
Ask any romance reader (or any therapist who works with women around intimacy) what the appeal actually is, and you'll get the same answer every time. It's not just about the sex, although the sex is often excellent. It's about being seen.
Sex therapist Vanessa Marin put it plainly in a piece about Bridgerton's runaway appeal: The reason these stories work for women is that they honour the female desire for emotional intimacy. A character who is truly perceived, who is known fully, flaws included, and desired anyway, is the fantasy. The physical is almost secondary. It's the lead-up, the tension, the moment someone looks at you like you are the only person in the room and they have been trying not to for six episodes. That's what sells.
This is why the slow burn is such a dominant force in romance. It's why Bridgerton season two, which had significantly less actual sex than season one, still left audiences in a complete frenzy. Eight episodes of Anthony and Kate refusing to acknowledge what was obviously happening between them turned out to be more erotic than anything that followed. Research actually backs this up: The anticipation of pleasure can often be more enjoyable than pleasure itself, and women in particular seem drawn to that simmering build.
It's also why enemies-to-lovers is the trope that keeps on giving. Enemies-to-lovers isn't really about conflict. It's about two people who see each other too clearly for comfort, and can't look away.
If you need a case study in what happens when romance fiction gets it exactly right, look no further than Rachel Reid's Heated Rivalry and the television phenomenon it became. The novel, second in Reid's Game Changers series, follows two rival professional hockey captains, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, whose very public feud conceals a years-long secret relationship. It's a gay romance. It's explicitly sexual. It's also a masterclass in slow burn, longing, and the specific agony of wanting someone you're supposed to hate.
The novel was adapted into a TV series that debuted on Crave in Canada and HBO Max in the US in late 2025, and the response was seismic. Within weeks, it had been named among the best queer television series of all time by Harper's Bazaar, ranked on best-of-year lists by Cosmopolitan, Refinery29, the New York Post and others, and sent audiobook streams of the source novel up 1500% on Spotify. The book became a New York Times bestseller. NHL games started getting references to it and celebrities requested to be involved in a second season.
What made it land so hard? The show's creator, Jacob Tierney, has been clear about his intention: "The sex was the storytelling, that was the character development, because that's when they're being honest." That's precisely what women have been finding in romance novels for decades – stories where physical and emotional intimacy are inseparable, where desire and vulnerability are the same thing, where sex actually means something about who these people are to each other.
Here's something that tends to surprise people: Women who read romance novels (including explicitly erotic ones) are not, by and large, confused about the difference between fantasy and reality. A study published in 2021 found that readers of erotic fiction are typically highly educated, describe themselves as avid readers, and – contrary to the cultural assumption that these books rot your brain – consider them to be emancipatory, feminist, and progressive. The prime rewards they identified? Distraction and ease. The ability to centre their own pleasure in a narrative, on their own terms, without having to justify it to anyone.
This matters because women have historically been told that wanting things, especially wanting things sexually and emotionally and loudly and without apology, is somehow too much. Romance fiction has always been a space where that doesn't apply. The heroine's desire is the whole point. Her satisfaction is the destination. And as author Jennifer Crusie has written, romance fiction at its best doesn't offer escapism so much as affirmation – showing women as active, intelligent protagonists of their own stories, taking control of their own lives.
You don't need a Duke of Hastings or a brooding hockey rival to deliver that. You need to actually show up, pay attention, and let the tension do its thing.
Here is what romance fiction, in all its gloriously unashamed forms, has been giving women for decades: Permission. Permission to want things. Permission to centre their own desire in the story. Permission to expect that intimacy should feel like something, that being desired should involve being truly seen, and that their pleasure is worth constructing an entire narrative around.
Bridgerton figured this out. Heated Rivalry figured this out. BookTok figured this out. And frankly, anyone navigating modern intimacy would do well to figure it out too. The bar is not corsets and carriages. The bar is just: Make it mean something.
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