I Highly Recommend Romance Novels If You’re Really Going Through It Right Now

A friend gifted me Royal Holiday by Jasmine Guillory when it came out in late 2019, and when I finally picked it up in March 2020, I had no idea a heartwarming Christmas romance was about to change my life. The last time I had read a romance novel before this was in high school, when I inherited a stack of bodice-rippers from my older cousin. Holiday’s charming pink and mint green cover looked different from the busty books I’d read years ago, though. I knew I couldn’t handle my typical harrowing fare—memoirs, psychological thrillers, and self-help—and wanted something fun and light to help me feel good. And I wasn’t the only one turning to rom-com novels during the dark early days of the pandemic: From January through May 2020, 16.2 million romance e-books and print books were sold, and sales continue to soar.

The same day I started reading Royal Holiday, I wrote about why calling COVID-19 the “Chinese Virus” and “Kung Flu” was deeply harmful to the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. Social media trolls told me it wasn’t racist to use those terms. At that point, my four-year-old twins, my husband, and I had been in lockdown for five days. It felt like five months.

At night, I dove into Guillory’s novel. The charming romance, set in modern-day England and complete with freshly baked scones and leisurely strolls on the green grounds of a castle, was the perfect place to escape my overwhelming reality. Under stay-at-home orders in Los Angeles, I felt squeezed on all sides as a mother, a writer, and an Asian American. I was constantly caregiving—searching for activities to keep my kids entertained, cooking meals, and tending to a sick dog. My brain felt like Swiss cheese by my children’s bedtime. But when I got lost in the sweet love story between an American mom and a debonair British gentleman who works for the queen, I felt swept away from the chaos of my life.

Over the next few months, as the world continued to feel upside down, I went on a romance novel binge. I blew through all of Guillory’s books, then dove into Talia Hibbert and Helen Hoang. Reading these stories was my spot of sunshine amid the doom and gloom of the news. When I had trouble sleeping, my comfort reads lulled me into relaxation. And though I’m no longer feeling as emotionally drained as I did in 2020, I haven’t quit my habit.

Here’s exactly how romance novels helped my mental health through the first year of the pandemic—and why I continue to rely on them to bring me pleasure.

Reading happily-ever-afters brought me comfort.

According to Stop Asian Hate, a coalition of three AAPI social service organizations, 6,600 hate incidents were reported from March 2020 to March 2021. AAPI women and girls were more than twice as likely than men to report a verbal or physical assault. I read countless headlines about Asian seniors being beaten. My worst day was reading a local New York news story about an elderly Asian woman who was set on fire (her shirt was burned, but she managed to avoid serious injury). This woman reminded me of my grandmother who always walked to get groceries. I cried while writing at my desk.

At night, I eagerly looked forward to reading the romances I downloaded from the Los Angeles Public Library. Some I devoured in three nights. Others I turned to when anxiety woke me up at 4 a.m. There was safety in the routine of knowing that every story I read ended happily; I didn’t have to wonder if the people I read about were hurting.

Romance novels also helped me with anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

As the height of the pandemic wore on, I slipped into depression. At first, I dismissed my symptoms—irritability, hopelessness, and physical exhaustion—as caregiver burnout mixed with stress from writing about the rapid rise in anti-Asian sentiments. I tried melatonin and meditation to help me relax, but reading romance worked better and seemed to pause the constant anxiety loop in my brain. To be clear, romance novels are not a substitute for mental health treatment—it ultimately took a combination of medication and therapy to help me manage my depression and anxiety—but the stories I read did help me unwind at a time when I desperately needed it.

It turns out, there’s some science to support the mental boost I got from my fictional companions. A 2022 study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that reading books was an effective coping strategy for emergency health care workers during the pandemic, reducing feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression. I would never compare my situation to theirs, and, again, you can’t read your way out of a mental health condition, but it’s encouraging to know that books can, in fact, make you feel a bit better when life gets dark and overwhelming.

And romance novels may be particularly helpful when it comes to loneliness and isolation. In a 2013 study in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, researchers talked to readers of specific book genres—domestic fiction, romance, science fiction/fantasy, and suspense/thriller—to understand how they might pick up on social and emotional nonverbal cues. Participants were asked to “decode emotions from black-and-white cropped images of people’s eyes” and the researchers found that romance readers “tended to perform better on picking up social cues” compared to readers of other genres.

Translation: Reading romantic novels might help make you feel more connected to other people, Katrina Fong, PhD, a researcher of social and personality psychology and the lead author of the study, tells SELF. And it’s not all that surprising, considering that romance, more than other genres, focuses so heavily on relationships. “Reading stories and connecting to the characters can help meet our personal psychological needs,” Dr. Fong explains. “It's possible that connecting to fictional characters can create a sense of closeness that staves off loneliness, especially if characters feel like real people to readers.”

Of course, this is just one study, and it didn’t specifically look at whether romance stories made readers feel less lonely or isolated. But it does suggest that the strong sense of connectedness I felt when I got to hang out with my romance-novel characters may have been the reason these books eased my loneliness during a very isolating time.

I felt emotionally validated by the characters.

Unlike the romance novels I read as a teen, my new reads had relatable characters. I saw myself in Chloe, the perpetual planner in Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert. As someone who married her BFF, I understood Alex and Poppy’s best-friends-to-lovers relationship in Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation. And as I was grappling with caregiver burnout and depression, I felt understood by Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle, a deeply vulnerable novel centered on Anna Sun, a young woman who is caring for her sick mother, and a guy she meets for a one-night stand.

When Anna felt guilty for wanting alone time in the midst of tending to her sick mother, I felt seen. Anna’s dilemmas, exhaustion, parental guilt, and depression mirrored my life in 2020. To see Anna speak up for herself allowed me to feel validated in meeting my own needs. “You may think you’re the only person who's experiencing something, but being able to see somebody else in a similar situation, coping with the same feelings, can help you feel less alone,” Dr. Fong says.

I spoke with Hoang about her experience drafting The Heart Principle while going through depression (which she details in her author’s note at the end of the book), and it was affirming for her too. “Writing about my personal experience made me cry. A lot. There were certain scenes that were so difficult to relive that I spiraled into bouts of depression after writing them,” Hoang tells SELF. “But as challenging as that was, I think that type of confrontation and self-reflection was healing as well. It was catharsis and validation. Through the power of storytelling, I was able to not only explain but show everyone what it was like to walk in my shoes.” Perhaps I was picking up on that too—Hoang’s own healing through her character’s stories. I was seeing and being seen, and therefore felt less alone.

It’s been nearly three years since I first cracked open Royal Holiday late at night while my kids and husband slept (oh, wonderful silence!), and I’ve been reading and loving romance novels ever since. I credit Red, White, & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston for getting me through my dog’s cancer diagnosis at the end of 2020, and dozens of other stories have helped me cope with hard times, restore my happiness, and express my needs. The joy in reading romance novels—however small it may seem—kept me anchored during a time when I felt like I was floating away in hopelessness, and now my to-be-read pile is more colorful and hopeful than it's ever been.

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