Lately, I’ve lost my appetite for angst in romance. Not conflict—romance needs conflict. A love story without obstacles isn’t a story at all. But these days, I have no patience for the ones steeped in suffering, where the characters aren’t just working through the barriers between them but are also drowning in personal misery, trauma, and tragedy. I don’t need broken people clawing toward each other like love is their last lifeline. I don’t need stories where the world is bleak, the characters are barely holding on, and happiness feels like a fluke rather than an inevitability.
It’s not that I’m avoiding hard things. I read literary fiction, where joy is doled out in sips. And, ugh, I read the news every damn day. I know life is unfair. I know people suffer. But romance, for me, isn’t where I go to marinate in despair. It’s where I go to believe in connection, in the idea that love is something we build, not just something we cling to in the wreckage.
Much of art—and romance is, of course, art—insists that struggle defines love. That if characters don’t endure a gauntlet of torment, their happily ever after won’t feel earned. But that’s nonsense. Plenty of great romances feature couples who navigate real obstacles without being trapped in lives full of suffering. The challenges to love don’t have to come packaged in relentless misery.
These days, I want my romance aspirational. Not in the fantasy-wealth, impossibly-gorgeous-people kind of way, but in the sense that it exists in a world where happiness feels possible. The journey to love can be hard—misunderstandings, distance, rivalries, personal growth—but I don’t want that journey set against a backdrop of relentless suffering. I don’t want stories where characters spend 90% of the book miserable, waiting for love to save them. I want a world where love isn’t the only bright spot but part of a life with space for joy.
Maybe someday, I’ll have the bandwidth for angst again. But today is not that day. So if you need me, I’ll be with the romances where love has obstacles but life isn’t a slog through endless pain. Where the world isn’t so bleak that happiness feels like an anomaly. If you love the dark, tortured stories, you do you. That’s fine. It’s just not what I need right now.
What about you? Have your tastes in romance changed? Are you here for the deep angst, or are you looking for love in all the light places?
The romances that touch me the most are the ones that have serious stuff and drama along with funny moments. It can be a sweet novel that touches on difficult topics, a cozy fantasy or mystery with a heroine who has suffered trauma and recovers little by little or a romantic comedy that touches on serious topics (I really liked Camilla Evergreen in that sense and Katherine Center) I just don’t want mountains of absolute misery where living is hell or perfect lives where the only problem is that the Christmas festival has been delayed and everyone is privileged, beautiful and happy.
Yes!
My concern is less the contents than the skill with which a book is written. I’ve read some books that take place in perilous times, like Our Darkest Night (Italy, WWII), that are absolutely lovely, where the author captures how humans can overcome the worst challenges with faith, love, and joy. I’ve also read novels where the author seemed to throw every ounce of torture she could think of at the h/h just to keep the plot active. Rather than adding depth to her story by exploring the triumph of the human spirit, the endless angst just exhausted me as the reader. So skill. That’s the added ingredient that can help me appreciate a more serious and dark romance. Other than that, give me a well-written rom-com.
I think that’s, in part, the influence of TV and movies–we’ve grown accustomed to endless (pointless) fight scenes, shoot outs, chase scenes, and other mayhem. I tend to see much of that, in those mediums, as lazy writing. A fight scene has a lot less nuance than a scene that shows characters’ inner lives.
Books increasingly seem like that to me too. The unbelievable, often more than one, plot twist, the lead being assaulted, raped, menaced–without real emotional power, these scenes detract from plot and character for me.
Sometimes it can get ridiculous, I’ve tried some dark romance books that aren’t as erotic or have less sexual content but they’re still popular and honestly… I laughed because the level of awfulness for the main character was absurd, in one paranormal dark romance the protagonist magically ends up in a parallel dimension where there is a zombie attack and she immediately has to escape from the zombies but the zombie leader becomes obsessed with her so within the first 10 pages she finds herself torn from her world, running from zombies with a crazy obsessed cannibal killer after her (the hero… what a gem) in another the book starts with the protagonist being kidnapped, she finds out that her father died and that she must pay the debt by providing sexual services to the protagonist who says romantic things like “show me your pussy and get on your knees” the protagonist proceeds to turn pages of misery… I’m sorry but I can’t take something seriously if they introduce me to a person and the next second misfortunes rain down on them and I start to see them suffer with little narrative logic.
600%!
I frequently describe myself as an “angst bunny” because I am generally Here For It in my romance, but as Maggie rightly says, how much it works for me depends on the skill of the author. I can’t stand angst and drama that is obviously contrived and thrown in for the sake of it and which doesn’t progress the plot or develop the characters in any way. When it’s done well, angst is kind of cathartic for me – it allows me to experience strong negative emotions from a place of safety because I know it’s all going to work out in the end.
Sadly, however, the number of authors who are able to write it well seems to be dwindling as, since the pandemic, so many have turned away from it and are instead writing romances with not only no angst, but hardly any conflict either. I get it – the world is a scary place, now more than ever it seems. But when I read, I want to get my teeth into something more than a nice story with nice protagonists and a nice romance set in a nice community etc. etc. It’s why I eschew a lot of contemporary romance and go for romantic suspense, urban fantasy romance etc – I want a decent plot and some character development alongside the love story.
I so agree: complexity and depth is what I want. It is so not the same as pain.
Yes, yes, yes. Dabney, you have pretty much summed up why I reject most “literary” fiction so when I read romance, I want not pain but growth, complexity and people I can identify with. Life is full of tragedy and we can let it suck us under or we can see it as (usually) transitory and find that life is, after all, a precious gift to be welcomed and relished.
Agreed. I generally think of angst as being something that relates to the characters or the situations they’re in rather than being mainly external.
I tend to steer away from books in which the characters struggle with serious issues like poor mental health because (in my reading experience, anyway) the romance often gets overshadowed by the personal development arc. Some authors seem to specialise in this and each book feels like it’s Disease of the Week. I feel like the characters are objectified and are defined by their symptoms. But I don’t want low angst, no conflict either because that’s boring and I end up skimming or DNFing.
I mostly read contemporaries now, partly because I got fed up with historical heroines who may have been in dire circumstances yet had idealistic modern attitudes. But when I come across financially insecure main characters in contemporaries who are working but living week to week, this makes me angry rather than just irritated like the historicals, because it’s not seen as a big deal but just part of modern life. And it shouldn’t be.
What I really want in a romance is a complicated relationship that takes its time to develop into love, in which the drama comes from the characters and their emotions rather than their external circumstances.
I agree with you Dabney; I fear that none of us will have much desire to experience any fictional trauma now that real life is full of it.
I’m one of those depends-on-the-story people; some angst is good – some is bathetic.
When I was younger, I read books like “Old Yeller,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Of Mice and Men,” and Zola’s “Germinal” that made me sob.
Now that I’m much older, I’ve experienced and witnessed enough pain. I don’t want to read books that are depressing, as they explore all the ways that people inflict pain on themselves and on others. If I want to cry, I can just look at the internet at starving babies.
My younger self had to learn about tragedy and disaster. My younger self would call me shallow. And that would be okay.
But I read romances because they make me happy. Hopefully, they infuse me with hope, laughter, and faith in humanity. And if the author throws in a happy dog, I’m hers for life.
I don’t mind books that make me cry. (I just watched Troubled Blood and sobbed through Joan’s death–it was so lovely and moving.) But pain for pain’s sake? No thank you. Pain whose point is to show that life is mostly just pain? No thank you.
I unabashedly avoid angst-filled romances, with a strong bias for romances with humor.
Beyond not liking stories that pile disasters on main characters, background settings can exceed my tolerance even when the MC story isn’t piling on pain. Years ago I read a book (either science-fictional romance or romantic science fiction) with a positive MC arc set in a universe where their WHOLE GALAXY was falling under the control of monstrous evil. I simply could not believe the MC HEA in that context. I can’t name the title or author since my usually decent memory for titles and authors has blocked that book.
I love angst in books but there’s a difference between wallowing in misery and/or being a real jerk to your characters (aka throwing multiple gratuitous obstacles in their way just to increase pathos) and characters overcoming real, heart-wrenching pain. I am probably in the minority but I like stories where secondary characters die, where babies are stillborn, where the main character do something really jerky and have to actually atone for wrongdoing.
The suffering has to have a purpose (within the book). It needs to be redemptive or transformative or clarifying. For instance, Laura Kinsale’s Shadowheart is just filled with angst, as is Flowers from the Storm. My goodness does she put her characters through the wringer. But it all feels necessary to their growth and eventual happiness. Versus the (what I feel is tacked on) ending to “One Day” — that book could have ended at the 80% point but characters but because “serious” literature can’t just be a sweet tale about two young, messed up being winding up together, there was the remainder. I get structurally that it was intended from the beginning, but it just didn’t work with where the story and the characters were going, IMO.
I have loved tearjerkers from a young age. Bridge to Terabithia, Love Story, Where the Red Fern Grows. Some of my favorites. Perhaps because I find being taken to the depths of despair and then back to be cathartic, even in these awful times.
I think there is a difference–at least in my mind–between a tearjerker and angst.
An angsty fiction story is one where the characters themselves are often miserable. They’re struggling with abuse, mental illness, and their sadness is the point of their lives and the novels. Those books rarely work for me. I once tried to read A Little Life and I couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to do so. I found Long Shot almost impossible to read even as I thought it was brilliant.
That’s very different than Bridge to Terabithia which I adore and Flowers from the Storm. In those books, the leads have to get through something really hard but they themselves aren’t simply miserable.
Here’s another example: My favorite fantasy series of all time is His Dark Materials. Those three books have several heartbreaking moments–my children can’t talk about Hester and Lee’s deaths without getting emotional and the final scene where Lyra and Will have to go part made me cry so hard I had to pull over and sit in a parking lot as I finished listening to the book. Pullman is continuing Lyra’s story in the Book of Dust series and I have found those books, especially book two which is about adult Lyra and Pan, rough going.
Why? In the first three Lyra books, she is a joyful character who navigates tragedy and threats. In The Secret Commonwealth where we meet her as an adult, she is miserable, mostly alone by choice, and suffering. The book has little humor, less love, and while I didn’t hate it, I’ll never willingly reread it.
That for me is what I am talking about when I talk about angst in fiction. It’s not books that make you cry–I love a good cry (I tear up just thinking about The Time Traveler’s Wife!)–it’s books that are all or almost all sadness and not much joy. Just as I need to have leads I can root for–I couldn’t get through Succession because I honestly couldn’t give a rat’s ass about a single one of them–I need worlds that I could live in.
I read the Dark Materials trilogy years ago and I described it as an opening / expanding / exploring / developing / discovering story for about 1,000 pages followed by a final 100 pages of a closing / contracting / retreating / limiting story. To put it mildly, I DID NOT LIKE the ending.
I have read a lot of books over the decades that have characters with dark back-stories or dealing with dire realities, but whether I enjoy or appreciate them depends on the geometry of the story arc. I want stories with a positive slope: the characters and/or situation are getting BETTER through the story, not stuck in a rut or going downhill.
I’ll have to think about that!
I too like an upward arc. That doesn’t always mean a happy ending. Even if something sad happens at the end, I want the person’s understanding, growth, awareness, something, to be better because of it. Life sucks and then you die does not make a rewarding story for me.
Yes. I think I feel even more strongly. I don’t want to consume art–right now–that ONLY communicates life sucks. I need hope, some joy.
I’m not a fan of angst overall, but I do love what I call emotional stories. When the angst happens is also a factor. I can enjoy reading about characters overcoming adversity, even really bad stuff, but without excessive suffering on page. In other words, backstories a difficult childhood, physical or mental health issues, etc can provide depth to the story without you having to read pages of misery. One of my recent favorites is Promises of Forever by Nicky James. Other examples across romance genres are The Last Wolf by Maria Vale and the older book, Beau Crusoe by Carla Kelly.
I actively avoid books where the characters are put through the wringer for angst sake.
For me it depends on the reactions of the characters to their problems. I want them to fight back, or at least stand up to that tide of troubles, not curl up in a ball and whine about it. I have little tolerance for self-pity.
I’m not a fan of what I call ‘manufactured angst’ novels, and plenty of those on the market, unfortunately – some of them were even made into movies (Nicholas*cough*Sparks.. gah!!).
That’s one of the reasons why i stopped reading Sherry Thomas – all the angst with little payout in the end – not worth my precious time. There’s one story (can’t recall the title) where the MMC and FMC (I think her name is Gigi?) who are separated right after their wedding because she marries him under false pretense, and then the two of them have to endure multiple missed encounters throughout the book that are included in the book for no other reason than to prolong the manufactured angst. I was done after that book.
Then there’s The Tea Rose (Jennifer Connely?) – same deal. I. Just. Can’t..!!
I actually love that Sherry Thomas book–Private Arrangements–because Cam and Gigi are happy in the novel. Their past has pain, but in the timeline in the book, they’re living pretty great lives.
What I am not here for is the Colleen Hoover angst–where leads both suffer and are super unhappy.
I’ve never read The Tea Rose but now I’m curious!
The Tea Rose is actually a good book, but it involves long separation (10 or 20 years, I think?) and while the two main characters grow along the way as individuals, there’s just too much sorrow inside that by the end of it, I was simply exhausted.
Sorrow is a good word in this convo. I struggle these days with too much sorrow in my art.
I am not opposed to angst per se but many recent contemporary and even historical novels have what I call angst equivalence. That is, both main characters are battling with separate traumas or mental health issues and the novel becomes stories of their separate struggles and combined struggles and then the whole story drowns in angst overload. Sherry Thomas’s His at Night is a case in point—I re-read it I recently and my reaction was why do they both have traumatized childhood, recurring nightmares etc.