Community You're Not Escaping Your Feelings. You're Finally Having Them.
The truth is that romance readers are chasing very specific emotional states, and they're not the easy emotions you'd expect. As I write this, I'm deep in the throes of building emotional taxonomy for Theo Reads — how readers feel when they finish a story — and my hours of research on how readers describe romance on various subreddits and on BookTok indicates that what they're not pleasant feelings. Words like "longing", "I was devastated", "this broke me", "I'm so gutted" keep coming up.¹ People are selecting, deliberately and repeatedly, the emotions that hurt.
