Not Just Love, Actually: Why Romantic Imagination Thrives | books

pPeople buy lipstick when the world is falling apart. This true economic theory, known as the “lipstick index,” was first observed by Leonard Lauder (Este’s most famous son). When the world looks particularly bleak — in the weeks and months after the fall of the Twin Towers, for example, or after the 2008 financial crash — and spending overall declines, lipstick sales tend to skyrocket.

The psychological truth at the heart of this equation is real: when people have less than they need, they spend more on small, beautiful things. Maybe it’s easy to dismiss this in the same way that most things with a female symbol are dismissed: trivial, extravagant, foolish. But that would be a mistake. One treasure, bright and brilliant, like a talisman; Candle at night. It is possible with your little candle to make your way in the dark. One joy against all this. The world collapses, and lipstick sales soar.

The same goes for sales of romance novels. As with lipstick, there were clear spikes in the numbers of romance novels sold after 9/11 and the 2008 crash. Perhaps not surprisingly, in our current climate, romance novel sales are at an all-time high.

Sales of printed romance fiction books in the United States have doubled in the past five years. Meanwhile, in the UK, the romance and epics category, which over two decades generated around £20m a year, jumped to a staggering £53.2m in 2022 during the pandemic, rising to £69m in 2024.

This has been an exceptional year for romance writing. Of course, established American romance writers, such as Emily Henry – whose most recent hit, “Great Big Beautiful Life,” the story of two authors competing to write a biography of a reclusive heiress who fall in love along the way – have continued to sell thousands of copies. But 2025 has also seen books like Jessica Stanley’s widely acclaimed Think Yourself a Kiss, sweeping into bookshops across the UK. Stanley’s book, in which an aspiring political commentator and an aspiring novelist try to build a life together, was never viewed as a romance novel, but it hits all the beats of a traditional romantic comedy. Likewise, Alison Espach’s “The Wedding People” – in which an accidental wedding guest falls in love with the groom – continues to increase sales on both sides of the Atlantic. In response, literary fiction became more romantic; What is Sally Rooney’s ever-popular “Normal People” but a romantic film at heart?

Love is everywhere, and while this doesn’t say anything good about the state of our world, it says only good things about our desire to connect. Romantic fiction, however you define it, is about the things that matter most. It’s about how you create community, and where it starts. It’s about love and everything that happens because of it. These are the books that sell; These are the stories people want to hear. Although you wouldn’t necessarily know it.

So-called “romance” books like A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas and The Fourth Suite by Rebecca Yaros climb to number one and stay there for weeks, even months. They are widely read, loved, sometimes hated, but always discussed – while being widely ignored by critics. This genre is seen as too trivial or too local to be taken seriously.

However, romantic fiction deals with big themes: chronic illness, global warming, divorce, death, betrayal, and despair. Depression, anxiety, and PTSD are often present – almost always trauma. Pain too. There is the housing market, issues of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism, fatphobia, sexism, classism, and all sorts of inter-departmental hatred and fear. All kinds of horror, love and loss.

These are not only found in books Designed To discuss this type of issue; These are books that are sold across the board for fun. They’re the books people really read, and no subject is too big or too bleak for romance fiction to exist around, around, and because of it.

For example, Yasmine Guillory writes (delightful) romance novels of the most delicate kind: there are sweets and pretty landscapes and fast cars and frilly underwear. They are also sharp analyzes of what it means to be fat, black, and a woman in the United States today: the vulnerabilities, the dangers, and the pleasures. British novelist Talia Hibbert writes about nannies and single parents. Angry artists and builders; Depressed security guards and sexy librarians. She also writes about chronic pain, racism, and complex family trauma. Queer romance (Casey McQuiston, Alexis Hall, Kate Young, and many more) is entering mainstream sales charts for the first time: Mills & Boon didn’t publish an explicitly queer title until 2020—and that’s incredible.

However, the trick is to treat all of this very lightly. When romantic fiction addresses the world’s problems, it should do so with a grace that you hardly notice. And you must do it in a way that makes the reader feel better About those things. Not for the romantic comedy, unresolved ending, and unreliable narrator. A romantic comedy should bring everything together, always, to get to a happy ending.

It’s the happy ending that throws people off. And this, critics of the genre suggest, is the part that marks these books as simple escapism—even fantasy. But life is full of moments that might serve as a happy ending, if anything ends at all. The problem with real life is that it goes on; The joy of a book is that it can stop at the perfect point.

I suppose the trick is to learn to recognize those moments. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “Notice when you’re happy, and at some point scream or mumble or think, ‘If that’s not nice, I don’t know what is.’” The best romance novels are books, fundamentally, about noticing things: about noticing someone across a crowded room, sure, but also noticing your friends, your family, the guy at the store who always asks how you’re doing, the good coffee, the soft new blouse, the pillows, the chips, the oysters, the sky, the sea, the sunset. A good romance novel is full of concrete, concrete things.

A good romance novel is full of people, moments, and things: not just the central couple, but everyone else. A good romance novel teaches you to notice these things for yourself. I read hundreds of romance novels last year — I was writing a book about romantic fiction — and by the end of the book, I was different. I was softer. I think I was happier, even though very little had changed materially. I’ve read books about love, and I’ve seen more love in the world than ever before.

The Lipstick Index tells us that people want beauty. The romance index, if we can call it that, tells us that people want to connect. People want each other, and that’s all we really have to offer.