Why I Stopped Reading Contemporary Romance in 2026: My Romance Era Is on Pause

My Romance Era

We've all had that one genre that we used to love, but now it just doesn't feel right anymore. For me, that was the romance genre. I started reading five years ago, and for a good three years, romance was one of my top genres, often competing with fantasy or mystery/thrillers.

It was the perfect form of escapism, and to me, I never felt like there was a designated time to read it. I could read it on long summer days, giggle about it at 2 am, and re-read the night's chapters before I began studying. I've read the historical romances, contemporary romances, romantasy, you name it.

But more and more often than not, I've realized I've significantly decreased the amount of romance in books I consume, especially in contemporary. Out of the 60 books I read last year, over a dozen of them were contemporary romances (just contemporary). This was a fraction of the 30 contemporary books I read out of nearly a hundred in 2023.

But in the great 2025, I've read a total of 3 contemporary romances. That makes a 15% contemporary romance read in 2025, 25% in 2024, and over 30% in 2023. I'm aware this is just my reading stats, and it doesn't reflect the reading community as a whole, but I thought I'd put it out there.

Image Credit: Elin Melaas on Unsplash

The Formula

There is an obvious decline in my reading of contemporary romance novels. The reason is simple: I don’t want to read a book when I already know the plot.

Contemporary romance, especially, has started to feel less like a genre and more like a formula. The structure barely changes. Two conventionally attractive people, always single, meet.

They dislike each other for a mild, easily fixable reason or cannot get together for another equally useless reason. They get together briefly. They pretend it didn’t happen. They get together again. Cue the third-act breakup. Cue the happily ever after.

And that happily ever after is almost always suspiciously tidy. Distant family issues? Magically resolved.

Emotional baggage? Healed just in time for the epilogue. It’s impossible to escape the sense that everything will work out simply because it's romance.

It's not that it's bad now, it's just that everything is so familiar. I can predict the same five tropes now. Actually, I don't have to, when, instead of giving us a synopsis for the book, authors are now relying on tropes to tell the story.

You can check any romance author's page when announcing a new book; it's guaranteed they'll have a post with a fan art or a cover of the book with the tropes plastered on it. Grumpy/sunshine, sports, fake dating, and miscommunication that could have been solved with one conversation.

Wash, rinse, publish. Quippy dialogue? Check.

Trauma reveal? Check. Instant attraction? Check. Third act breakup? Check. In publishing nowadays, it feels like authors are just churning out the same book over and over again because it's been proven to work. It's not just that the plot and tropes are being reused. It's the covers.

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The Covers: Part of the Problem

I wholeheartedly believe this is part of the problem. If you were to walk into a bookstore's romance section, it's guaranteed that nearly all of them will look the same. Pastel covers and two cartoonish figures. It might feel familiar to a few readers, and they can expect what they will read, but honestly, I'm over them.

I personally don't think a book with explicit scenes should have a cartoon cover (Icebreaker, anyone?). A lot of people online say it's miles better than the shirtless men in the early 2010's, and I agree to some extent. You're probably more prone to be embarrassed reading a book on the train with a shirtless guy than with two cartoonish figures. But it's misleading and frankly boring.

If I had to guess at least 90 percent of modern contemporaries are all the same covers, and honestly, it's repetitive. It doesn't tell me the deeper themes a story might contain, just how they look like so I won't confuse a blonde guy as another brunette.

Image Credit: Elin Melaas on Unsplash

It also flattens the genre into something purely aesthetic, like romance exists only to be consumed quickly and discarded just as fast. Covers used to hint at mood and stakes but now? They blend in so well with their hundreds of copies, it's maddening.

It makes a story that could want to maybe talk about something more emotionally heavy look harmless and quirky. They lose their chance to signal any depth.

Romance already fights the idea that it is shallow, and these covers do not help. They make the books feel interchangeable before you even open the first page. Romance needs to decide whether it wants to stay comfortable (which, unfortunately, is what sells) or become interesting again.

Familiarity can be nice, but when everything looks and reads the same, curiosity dies. You might pick up romance regularly, but are you even surprised by it half of the time? I did not stop loving romance altogether, I just stopped being surprised by it. And until the genre takes more risks, I am okay leaving my romance era right where it is.