Both romantic love and artistic expression have been parts of human nature itself since the earliest days of humanity, so it was something of an inevitability that love would find a great avenue of expressing itself through different types of art, from poetry and prose to sculpture, music, painting and film. Romantic novels, also known as romance novels, for instance, are some of the best-selling books on the market. We have all heard love songs playing on the radio or at any popular establishment; you may even own entire collections of songs about love. Many classic paintings express romantic feelings, and romance has been one of the most widely used sources of inspiration for beautiful poetry and drama.

Romantic fiction, a genre that includes romantic novels as well as romantic short stories, is a kind of fiction whose main plot always focuses on romantic love, the falling in love of two people who, overcoming physical, material, social or emotional obstacles, finally become happy together and develop their relationship. As a general rule of thumb, the conditions for a piece of fiction to be categorized as “romantic fiction” are that the plot must primarily be oriented toward this kind of romance, and that the story must have a happy (or at least mostly happy) ending.

While it is a commonly held stereotype that love stories and romantic novels are for women, there is actually a popular subgenre within romantic fiction dedicated to men and written about romantic love from men’s perspective.