I’ve been a romance reader since long before I understood anything about men, women, or the world. As a pre-teen, I used to sneak my mother’s bodice-rippers into my bedroom and read them under the covers with a flashlight. By the time she realized what I was doing, I’d already burned through her entire library. Twice.
Around seventeen, I did something only an autistic book-dragon would consider reasonable: I sat down and built a structural outline of all Harlequin novels. Every trope. Every beat. Every emotional turn. Twenty-seven points that explained why the books worked, and why certain variations didn’t.
Those early obsessive years taught me something important: Romance looks chaotic on the surface, but underneath it runs on a tight, repeatable skeleton. And over time, as I drifted into different subgenres, one of them became the center of gravity for me: Regency romance. Yes, like Bridgerton, more or less (at least the original book series.) Or better, like Jane Austen.
Romance isn’t just culturally powerful; it’s commercially enormous. At its documented peak, the Romance Writers of America estimated that the genre accounted for 13.5% of the entire consumer book market in the U.S. — all books. In some years, it dominated “genre fiction” so completely that romance made up as much as 39% of all genre fiction sales. Four out of every ten genre novels sold, in other words, was a romance. No other category of fiction comes close to that level of market penetration or reader loyalty — not mystery, not thrillers, not science fiction, not fantasy. Romance has always been the engine of commercial fiction, even when the industry is embarrassed to admit it.
Of all romance novels, Regency stories had the strongest bones. The stakes made sense, the social rules mattered, and the characters behaved like products of a real historical era instead of modern people in fancy clothing. Jane Austen was the backbone, Georgette Heyer built the cathedral, and everyone since then has been writing in that shadow, some more faithfully than others.
What I didn’t understand then, but see very clearly now, is that my teenage instincts weren’t nostalgia or sentiment. They were pattern recognition. Regency appealed to me because it aligned with the architecture of human nature. And that architecture begins with a truth most modern people try very hard to ignore:
Pair-bonding is the core of human civilization.
Once you strip away the lace, the dukes, and the witty banter, all Romance novels orbit the same ancient gravitational center: two people choosing each other. Two people negotiating trust, restraint, vulnerability, loyalty, and the desire for a shared future. Two people forming the smallest, most stable (by far) social unit human beings have ever created. Anthropologists haven’t found a society that functions without some form of durable pair-bonding. It’s older than politics, older than nations, older than the written word.
Romance isn’t conservative because it’s nostalgic. Romance is conservative because it mirrors this ancient structure.
The genre can decorate itself in progressive aesthetics — STEM heroines rolling their eyes at tradition, emotionally stunted heroes unlearning their armor, elaborate consent negotiations, kink exploration, even the occasional polycule — but the underlying machinery doesn’t budge. Even the most progressive-coded novels at some point collapse back into the same shape: two people in an exclusive emotional bond, overcoming internal and external obstacles to form a stable, future-oriented partnership.
Readers instinctively feel when a story honors this structure. They also feel when a story violates it. This is why the “boundary-breaking” subgenres flare brightly and die quickly. They make excellent marketing copy. They feed the hype cycle. But they don’t endure. Nobody rereads them ten years later. Nobody hands them down. Nobody builds a 40-year career on experimental novelty.
Readers will try anything once. They will cling to what feels true.
Austen remains. Heyer remains. Mary Balogh, who I'm reading right now, remains. So do the quiet giants and mid-list matriarchs whose names never trend but whose backlists sell steadily, year after year, because their stories respect the human template.
And that brings me to a point almost no one wants to say out loud: The genre looks progressive today because gatekeepers want it to. Not because readers do.
For years, editors and marketers in New York have pushed the idea that progressive reinventions are the future of Romance: stories that decentralize monogamy, destabilize commitment, or treat pair-bonding as optional. They market them loudly. They buy them aggressively. They congratulate themselves on their forward-thinking.
But the moment authors get their rights back and go directly to readers, a different picture emerges. The writers who try self-publishing, usually for the first time in their careers, and thrive are the ones who have always written to the old structure. They are the ones who respect history, respect human nature, and write stories that readers want to return to, not just sample.
Meanwhile, the authors pushed hardest during the progressive “relevance” boom almost never have lasting second lives. Their books don’t get rediscovered. They don’t get reread. They don’t survive outside the marketing bubble that birthed them. They fall out of fashion. Houses birthed to support these new progressive authors, like Ellora's Cave, ultimately collapse.
The industry can push a message. But only readers can create longevity. And readers always gravitate to the old truths.
Which brings us back to Regency, the subgenre that makes the skeleton most visible. Everything about the Regency world reinforces pair-bonding: the social season, the chaperonage, the weight of reputation, the logic of inheritance, the understanding that marriage is both a personal and a communal choice. You didn’t need to invent drama in that world; the drama was baked in.
Austen understood that moral architecture instinctively. Heyer understood it academically. And every successful Regency writer since has followed the same logic, even if they couldn’t articulate it: the clearer the social structure supporting pair bonding, the stronger the story.
Regency avoids the problem that plagues other subgenres, especially contemporary ones that insist triads or rotating constellations of lovers can offer the same stability as a traditional couple. Human beings don’t attach evenly like that. The seams show immediately. The story strains against the limits of biology. But in Regency, the emotional stakes are already sharp. The constraints are real. The consequences matter. And because they matter, the love story matters.
That’s why the subgenre will not die. It can slow down, but it will always come roaring back, because it expresses the one truth Romance cannot function without: two people fighting the world and themselves to build a life together.
Here's my point:
Because the structure of romance is unchangeable, because the genre depends on pair-bonding, stability, and the disciplined formation of a lasting bond, romance is inherently conservative. Not conservative in the narrow political sense, but conservative in the deeper, civilizational sense: grounded in truths that resist ideology, trends, and wishful thinking. Grounded in the instinct that built human culture long before anyone tried to analyze it.
The stories endure because the structure endures. And the structure endures because human nature does.
Romance isn’t conservative by accident.
It’s conservative because nothing else works.
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