Why I Started Theo Reads

I didn't grow up dreaming about my wedding day.

No prince charming, no happily ever after waiting at the end of the story. Growing up in India, my dream was simpler and more urgent than that. I wanted to be financially independent. I wanted to take care of my mother. That was it.

In India back in those days, and perhaps still, nobody talked to us about sex. Not at home, or at school. In the land of the Kamasutra, desire, pleasure, what it means to feel wanted, all of it was a mystery nobody would explain. So I learned about kisses, and orgasms, and yes, aftercare, from romance novels. I learned, by flashlight, that my body could feel things. All from romance books.

My brother and I were also growing up with an absent father. And the message from the extended family, delivered the way extended families deliver messages, casually, repeatedly, was that I should never depend on a man for anything. Ever. Not financially, or emotionally. I had to be strong.

It wasn't until my mother was dying under my care many years later, and I had no choice but to feel everything, that I understood how fractured I'd become.

We are meant to feel romantic love. We are meant to feel erotic desire. When we lock those parts away, which so many of us do, for reasons that make complete sense given the lives we've lived, we don't get stronger. We get lonely.

The U.S. Surgeon General called loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023, and I wasn't surprised at all.

We stopped feeling and called it strength.

The Opportunity

I started Theo Reads because I'm an opportunist. I'm not embarrassed to admit that.

Romance is a multi-billion dollar industry and the bestselling fiction genre in America, yet it has never been harder to find a good story. Romance readers finish around 32 stories a year, nearly three times the national reading average, and I suspect that's an undercount. And yet, discovery is broken. We hear about the same 10 books, from the same 10 influencers on BookTok. Amazon keeps shadow-banning the spicier stories, and has no system to reject AI-written ones. There's a real gap. I built Theo Reads to fill it.

But that's not the only reason, and it's not even the main one.

I started Theo Reads because I recognized myself in the problem. Building this, while caring for my dying mother, and talking to hundreds of readers and writers about what they're actually reaching for when they open a romance novel at the end of a long day, I realized I wasn't the only one who'd locked themselves away.

A romance novel is not a substitute for real human connection. But it is a safe place to feel the full range of being human.

Where desire is not shameful.
Love is not weakness.

Where you are promised, after 400 pages of longing and tension and heartbreak, that it is going to be okay.

That's something.

What I Want Theo Reads to Be

Love is not a liability. Desire is nothing to apologize for. Your body is yours, and what it wants is not shameful. I want Theo Reads to normalize this.

So, together with our authors, we're building you somewhere to feel all of it.

Tender, sensuous, a little wrecked, fully human.

And true to form - we are in romancelandia after all - it worked out for me. I found my person (or he found me), and we built a life together, and it's a good one.

So if you're not sure you'll find your happiness, it can happen. I'm living proof.

And in the meantime, while you're waiting, or healing, or figuring it out, or just needing somewhere to feel something real for an hour before bed, we're here.