People buy lipstick when the world is falling apart. This genuine economic theory, known as the “lipstick index”, was first noted by Leonard Lauder (son of the more famous Estée). When the world seems very bleak – in the weeks and months after the twin towers fell, for instance, or after the 2008 financial crash – and spending generally goes down, lipstick sales trend strongly upwards.
The psychological truth at the heart of this equation is real: when people have less than they need, they spend more on small, beautiful things. It’s easy, maybe, to dismiss this in the way most feminine-coded things are dismissed: frivolous, wasteful, foolish. But that would be a mistake. A single treasure, bright and gorgeous, is like a talisman; a candle in the night. It is possible, with your small candle, to make your way in the darkness. One delight, against all this. The world crumbles, and lipstick sales go up.
And so, too, do sales of romantic fiction. Just as with lipstick, there were clear spikes in the numbers of romance novels sold after 9/11 and the 2008 crash. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in our current climate, sales of romantic fiction are at an all-time high.
Print sales of romance fiction in the US have doubled in the last five years. Meanwhile, in the UK the romance and sagas category, which had for two decades made around £20m annually, leapt to a staggering £53.2m in 2022 during the pandemic, growing to £69m in 2024.
This has been an extraordinary year for romantic writing. Established American romance writers such as Emily Henry – her latest hit, Great Big Beautiful Life, tells the story of two authors vying to write the biography of a reclusive heiress who themselves fall in love along the way – have continued to sell thousands of copies, of course. But 2025 has also seen books such as Jessica Stanley’s widely acclaimed Consider Yourself Kissed sweep bookshops across the UK. Stanley’s book, in which an ambitious political commentator and aspiring novelist try to build a life together, was never conceived of as a romance novel, but it hits every beat of a traditional romcom. Similarly, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People – in which an accidental wedding “guest” falls, sort of, for the groom – continues to stack up sales on both sides of the Atlantic. And literary fiction is growing more romantic in response; what is the perennially popular Normal People by Sally Rooney but a romcom at heart?
Love is everywhere, and while that says nothing good about the state of our world, it says only good things about our desire for connection. Romantic fiction, however you define it, is about the things that matter most. It is about how we create community, and where that starts. It is about love and everything that happens because of it. These are the books that are selling; these are the stories people want to hear. Though you wouldn’t necessarily know it.
So-called “romantasy” books such as A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas and Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros climb to the No 1 spot and remain there for weeks, even months. They are widely read, loved, sometimes hated but always discussed – while being widely ignored by the critics. The genre is seen as too frivolous, or too domestic, to be taken seriously.
And yet romantic fiction handles big themes: chronic illness, global warming, divorce, death, betrayal and despair. Depression, anxiety and PTSD often appear – trauma, almost always. Pain, too. There’s the housing market, issues around antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, fatphobia, sexism, classism, all kinds of interdepartmental hatred and fear. All kinds of horror, love and loss.
These don’t just exist in books designed to discuss these kinds of issues; these are the books that sell across the board, for pleasure. They are the books that people are really reading, and there is no subject too big or too bleak for there to exist romantic fiction about and around and because of it.
Jasmine Guillory, for instance, writes (delightful) romantic fiction of the fluffiest kind: there are sweet treats and beautiful landscapes and fast cars and lacy lingerie. They are also sharp analyses of what it means to be fat and Black and a woman in the US today: the vulnerabilities, the dangers, the pleasures. UK novelist Talia Hibbert writes about nannies and single dads; artists and grumpy building caretakers; brooding security guards and sexy librarians. She is also writing about chronic pain, racism and complex family trauma. Queer romance (Casey McQuiston, Alexis Hall, Kate Young, so many more) is entering mainstream sales charts for the first time: Mills & Boon didn’t publish an explicitly queer title until – this is unbelievable – 2020.
And yet the trick is to hold all this very, very lightly. When romantic fiction tackles the problems of the world it must do so with such grace that you barely notice. It must do so in a way that makes the reader feel better about those things. Not for the romcom the unresolved ending, the unreliable narrator. The romcom must bring everything together, always, to a happy ending.
It is the happy ending that throws people. That, critics of the genre like to suggest, is the part that marks these books as simple escapism – even fantasy. But life is full of moments that might function as a happy ending, if anything ever ended. The problem with real life is that it goes on; the joy of a book is that it can stop at the perfect point.
The trick, I suppose, is to learn to identify those moments. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point: ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’” The best romantic novels are books, at base, about noticing things: about noticing someone across a crowded room, certainly, but also noticing your friends, your family, the guy at the corner shop who always asks you how you are, a good coffee, a soft new jumper, cushions, crisps, oysters, the sky, the sea, the sunset. A good romantic novel is full of things that feel tangible and tactile.
A good romantic novel is full of people and moments and things: not just the central couple, but everyone else, too. A good romantic novel teaches you to notice these things for yourself. I read hundreds of romantic novels last year – I was writing a book about romantic fiction – and by the end of it, I was different. I was softer. I was, I suppose, happier, though very little had materially changed. I had read books about love, and I saw more love in the world than ever before.
The lipstick index tells us people want beauty. The romance index, if we can call it that, tells us that people want connection. People want each other, which is all we ever truly have to give.
• In Love With Love: The Persistence and Joy of Romantic Fiction by Ella Risbridger is published by Sceptre. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
