Trying to Sound Sexy: What Romance Narration Is Really About

Why is romance so popular? Why does it work so well in audio? And what does a narrator actually bring to a romance or an intimate scene? Love stories, they have been around for as long as people have been telling stories.

We find them in ancient myths and fairy tales and plays and some of the earliest novels known to man.

And then you go get things like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which was published in 1813.

And so much of what romance readers love is already sitting right there on the page.

It's timeless.

Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy misunderstand each other, judge each other, irritate each other, and eventually have to change the way they see themselves and each other.

So, no, BookTok didn't invent enemies to lovers, and it definitely didn't invent the brooding man who's terrible at communicating.

And yet, romance has carried this strange cultural baggage for years when we try to talk about it.

People dismiss it as fluff or escapism, or they say it isn't real reading.

And that's always been interesting to me because nobody seems bothered when somebody escapes into a murder mystery or an epic fantasy.

Apparently, you know, solving an impossible murder counts as serious entertainment, and riding a dragon into battle is perfectly respectable as long as we talk about, you know, the magic system and not the love that may be incorporated into it.

But when two people fight their way toward emotional intimacy in any of those genres, someone wants to call it a guilty pleasure and dismiss it.

And I don't feel guilty about it at all.

You know, sex itself is still a surprisingly difficult subject for people to talk about openly.

We can sell products with it.

We can joke about it and use it to get attention.

But honest conversations about desire are often treated very differently.

And that's especially true when the person expressing that desire is a woman.

And literature was exploring those questions long before women had many public places where they could discuss them freely.

Novels gave women private access to stories about attraction and sexual choice and marriage and power and the consequences of wanting something outside the life society had chosen for them.

I mean, can we say dangerous? Now...

Those books weren't romance novels as we define the genre today, but they pushed against many of the same boundaries.

And modern romance continues that conversation.

It allows female characters to want things.

They can initiate intimacy and set limits and change their minds and discover what pleasure means to them.