Unfortunately, the best vehicle for a fictional romance is not a romance novel. A really good romance should prove how the characters’ whole lives fit together. A romance novel is maybe 40% about the romance and 60% about other stuff, including the context of the leads’ lives.
I think the sweet spot is more like 15% romance. I want space for the characters’ friends, histories, old relationships, patterns of conflict. Sometimes a long fanfiction scratches this itch. In original fiction, I can only recall encountering it in
- Alexander Wales’s Worth the Candle, which is singular among these examples for having a long, convincing non-endgame romance that was not derogatory to the non-endgame interest, and portrayed the protagonist learning things in the relationship that enriched the endgame romance
- Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey series, where Peter’s love interest Harriet appears halfway through the series. She is a murder suspect in the first book she appears in, the co-solver in the second, and the primary investigator in the third.
- Robert Galbraith / JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, where the romance still has not resolved as of book eight of a ten-book plan.
I would probably not be reading Cormoran Strike if I weren’t so starved of romance fiction where the romance comprised less than 25% of the story. (It feels like 7% of this series is about the romance, but whatever, good enough.) The books are bloated, the mysteries seem mediocre, and I’m not enamored with the actual couple as people. But I read almost to the end of what’s currently published because, well, I do think they should get together. I’m invested.
Book 3 ended on an insane romance development: she is getting married after almost calling the wedding off, he came late to her wedding right after catching a serial killer. She didn’t know he would attend – he fired her a week ago, over an incident where she was wrong and unprofessional but also kind of valid. She hasn’t smiled once during the ceremony, but beams and says “I do” while looking at him – not her fiancé.
I am not claiming this is romantic – it is not to me – but it did make me cackle and think, “It appears you are serious about making this romance insane and prolonged, let’s fucking go”.
Why is it good if it’s insane and prolonged? Because, by book six or so, I deeply bought these two as a couple, to a degree a non-prolonged romance could never make me feel. The characters brought their histories and biases with them when interviewing witnesses, had eureka moments together, and saw each other accomplish social or intellectual victories that drove attraction. You can’t “prove” compatibility to this degree if a couple gets together in the span of one novel.
I find the Wimsey series compelling for the same reason. Plenty of romance novels have a mystery as the formal structure1, but something magical happens when you use a mystery series as the backbone of a long-running romance, because this is format allows the protagonists to really come alive as minds^[2]. In both series, I was sold on the partnership because the books gave me so much evidence that they cared about the same things, were intellectual equals, and (in Cormoran Strike) had the complementary skill sets to run a phenomenal business together.
Footnotes
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I think mysteries are the best form of novel in a way, because information grows monotonically. Action/conflict novels contain setbacks that make it hard to use any single axis as a progress bar. Mysteries seem superior because “what bearing does an event have on filling out the blanks for the mystery” is a more limiting and clarifying question for both author and reader than “what bearing does an event have on the outcome of a conflict”. ↩