Why Romance?

People love to ask: “Why romance?”
As if love stories are something you grow out of. As if happy endings are less literary than tragic ones. As if exploring the human heart is somehow less important than saving the world.

But here’s the thing—romance is the world.

Romance is resistance. It’s choosing softness in a world that wants you to be hard. It’s choosing vulnerability over detachment, hope over cynicism. Romance says: your feelings matter. Your pleasure, your joy, your longings—they matter.

And contrary to popular belief, romance isn’t all hearts and rose petals. It's messy. It's political. It’s deeply rooted in the realities of identity, class, race, gender, power. In many stories, the stakes aren’t just love—they’re survival, belonging, freedom.

So why romance?

Because I want stories that center people who don’t always get the spotlight—women, queer folks, BIPOC characters, disabled characters, fat characters, working-class heroes. Stories where desire isn’t punished, softness isn’t weakness, and love belongs to everyone—not just the straight, thin, wealthy, neurotypical default. Because I want stories that understand that emotional courage is just as brave as grieving a lost child in the shadow of history, unraveling identity amid societal collapse, or facing the absurdity of existence with nothing but a cigarette and a hollow stare. Because I want to believe that love—messy, inconvenient, transformative love—is still worth writing about.

Romance lets us imagine the world not just as it is, but as it could be. Better. Kinder. Sexier.

So yeah, I’ll keep reading the books with the swoony declarations, the yearning glances, the third-act grand gestures. I’ll keep watching the films that make me cry over characters who learn to love themselves as much as each other.

And I’ll keep writing about it all here, in The Lover’s Digest.

Because love stories aren’t a guilty pleasure. They’re a powerful one.