Why ‘RomCom’ can be a reductive word…

I’ve seen it lots of times from readers on social media: ‘Why is this book called a RomCom? I didn’t think it was very funny.’ Or the opposite: ‘This book was so funny, but I didn’t feel the chemistry between the love interests.’

Why the current obsession with coupling romance with comedy?

Obviously, it does have a history from the films of the 1990s, but why is there now an expectation that a romance needs to be funny and light?

I can hear you say that not all romances are, but the ones that aren’t tend to blur genre lines, particularly with the happy ending in doubt. Why are the majority of what I would call romances these days marketed as RomCom, regardless of how funny they actually are?

Of course there are romances out there that aren’t particularly funny, but using the term puts boundaries and expectations on the genre – and influences the acquisitions of publishers and the editorial decisions of independent publishers – skewing romance in a direction it maybe doesn’t always want to go.

Romance and comedy aren’t natural partners, even though of course they can work wonderfully together. Falling in love with someone is a deeply personal event, vulnerable and tender, with many obstacles to overcome and layers of hurt to shed.

While comedy can touch on deeply personal topics, it’s typically light and harmless – or comedy that’s not light and harmless is very risky in print.

So why does the current market make romance light and harmless and funny? I would argue it’s reducing the impact of what the genre could be, the expectation that it should be light and make us laugh all the time.

Romance shouldn’t be an embarrassed giggle because someone has a crush.

Both romance and comedy writing are wonderful, but the expectation that a book should be both should only be a small slice of the market in either genre. I truthfully think the term ‘RomCom’ is a result of the lingering misogyny and scorn for romance (and women writers) in publishing. ‘A love story is just cringe on its own, so it has to be funny and light to be bearable.’

Women’s voices in fiction are still marginalised, even though the majority of authors today are women. The stories women are allowed to tell are restricted and reduced to banalities. In crime fiction, female detectives are popular, but with expectations that they’ll conform to the male stereotypes of the profession (and many are written by men, sometimes pseudonymously – and occasionally with a very gratuitous portrayal of the woman for the male gaze).

Stories of family, relationships, emotional high points either need to be fluffy or they need to be tragic – the nuance in between isn’t recognised in the market.

And so we arrive at a place where people are surprised when a love story has any depth, when a female character is allowed to have flaws and complex shades of grey in a romance. I would argue a love story lends itself to deep characterisation and exposing the flaws that any believable character would have. Why do we have to dumb down our love stories into something that’s supposed to be light and funny throughout the entire book? And why do we have to market them as fluffy trash?

When I was writing my debut, My Christmas Number One, I was pretty much oblivious to market trends and traditional publishing. I just wrote the book in a way that felt right to the characters. It was when the book came out and someone described it as ‘funny’, that I began to see the way the books I’d been reading for years (and unconsciously took into my own writing) also leaned into certain comedy elements.

To be clear, I don’t think I can write romance without comedy, but I also never focus on the comedy as the main feature of the book. The romance comes first. Some of my books are funnier than others and the funnier ones are actually quite divisive among readers. The comedy that I gravitate towards is the ‘real life’ funnies of teasing and banter, running jokes and some comedic timing (the moment Cara’s father turns up in My Christmas Number One comes to mind). I can’t do without these because I tend to find a lot of things in life funny.

But the romance should always be played for the romance, the sparks of attraction followed by growing attachment. If some people feel too exposed while reading a love story, that’s fine – perhaps it’s not for them. But the expectation that a romance should also be funny shouldn’t be an excuse to tiptoe around the grand emotions required for the love story.

Romance shouldn’t be an embarrassed giggle because someone has a crush. It’s an experience that changes people, for better or worse – in the romance genre, it changes people for the better – and that’s fascinating.

There’s space in the market for a whole range of romance, not only ‘RomCom’, and using the word to encompass the vast majority of the genre reduces the impact of both true RomComs and all other forms of romance.

I used to make up excuses for what I was writing, saying I was just fiddling around with romance until I had the headspace to write something literary. Now I stand behind what I write and want to write my love stories as compelling commercial fiction, full of authenticity – prove that romance is more than a set of well-loved tropes and some laughs, as wonderful as those tropes and laughs can be!