Have you ever been stuck on campus with no way to release any pent-up stress? Has the Oregon rain put a damper on your plans? Are you a fan of reading as if your life depends on it? Look no further, because I highly recommend putting down your chem book and picking up a romance novel.
Romance novels are nothing new, with the first of its kind being published in the 1700s, starring a maid and her land-owning master. Yikes, I know, but for some, the taboo or socially frowned upon is what makes romance novels so alluring. Our grandparents had a version of romance novels called “Harlequin novels,” making their debut in 1949 and hitting their stride in the 1970s. These books had predictable plots, happy endings, and the first openly distributable erotic scenes in literature, and they were specially curated for women. As the feminist movement grew, so too did the sexual liberation of women, both coming together to birth the genre as we know it today. The stories got more complex until the plot was equally as yearned for as the erotica, focusing on period romances and stories full of action, suspense, and mystery. Today’s romance novels don’t have constraints when it comes to plot, and many of them aren’t censored in the slightest, though that doesn’t stop the most popular of these books from being some of the most beloved classics in literature. Though 50 Shades of Grey is the best-selling romance novel of all time, second place goes to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, written nearly 200 years before 50 Shades’ first installment. Of the top 10, 3 are written in the 19th century, celebrating authors such as Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Leo Tolstoy, and Shakespeare’s 1564 Romeo and Juliet holds its own spot at number 9.
However, unlike the genre of days old, romance today is a wide-reaching literary genre, so wide that it is the fastest-growing genre of fiction, with a 66 percent increase in romance sales from 2021 to 2022 alone. Not only is the genre growing, but so is the demographic it appeals to; 10 years ago, the main romance-reading group was women ages 35-54. Today, the leading romance-reading group is women ages 18-54, with 70 percent of readers discovering the genre between the age of 11 and 18. And these statistics don’t surprise me at all! Today’s 35-year-olds were freshly 18 when the romance whirlwind that is Twilight came out in 2005. Readers today thrived off of Twilight and similar titles through both literature and media, with a host of popular romance novels being converted to the big screen or similar within recent years, including Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and Bridgerton, along with teen-friendly titles such as A Fault In Our Stars, Love Simon, and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.
I predict that the age of romance readers will continue to climb downward as more and more kids raised on Wattpad and Tumblr grow up and have the cash to spare for endless passion-filled adventures on the page. Embarrassment is an emotion of the past. Guilty pleasures are, of course, good for the soul. So when you have a troublesome midterm that makes you toss and turn at night, grab a bodice-ripper and make sure the tossing and turning are on your own accord. — Haley Berger
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