How Romance Novels Can Be “Unrealistic” and Still Be Emotionally Honest: The Line Between Fantasy and Emotional Truth

The Eye Roll Heard ‘Round the World

We’ve all heard it—if we write romance, read romance, or so much as breathe in the same room as someone holding a romance novel.

“He’s a billionaire? And an ex-Navy SEAL? And a single dad who owns a wolf sanctuary? Sure, he is.”

Cue the eye roll and the knee-jerk dismissal from someone who just can’t with the fantasy of it all. There’s always that one person—usually someone who considers emotionally constipated literary fiction the height of culture—ready to remind you that love stories are “unrealistic.” That real men don’t talk like that, and real relationships don’t end in sweeping declarations timed perfectly with the first snowfall of the year.

Sure, maybe the setup includes a heartbroken baker who just inherited a crumbling coastal cottage. A rugged handyman with a golden retriever that won’t leave her side. A kitchen renovation. A flour fight . . .

Does any of that sound like real life? Maybe not in the literal sense. I don’t know many emotionally wounded men who process their grief by building bookshelves and rescuing stray dogs, but I do know what it’s like to try to rebuild your life from ruins. I know what it feels like to have your heart handed back to you, gentler than you expected. I know what it means to want something soft after life’s been hard.

Romance is called “unrealistic” not because it lacks truth, but because it dares to center emotional truth in a world that demands stoicism. It exaggerates the outer story to get at the inner one—the messy, aching, vulnerable parts that most people are too afraid to say out loud.

So yes, maybe the premise is ridiculous. Maybe the timeline is compressed, the dialogue is idealized, the abs are suspiciously plentiful. But the feeling underneath it—the loneliness, the hope, the hunger for connection—that’s more honest than a hundred award-winning novels about middle-aged professors quietly falling apart in upstate New York.

Why Romance Doesn’t Need to Be Realistic to Be Emotionally Honest—and Why That Matters More Than Ever

Let’s take a moment to define terms. Fantasy, in this context, isn’t about dragons or intergalactic orgies. It’s the emotional fantasy. The story that lets you imagine a world where the love you crave is possible, and where the emotional payoff actually arrives on time for once. It’s not about realism, it’s about relief.

It’s the version of life where your boundaries are respected, the apology comes with changed behavior, and the guy you thought ghosted you shows up not just with an explanation—but growth, insight, and maybe a cat he adopted because it reminded him of you. That’s the fantasy. Emotional competence wrapped in a six-foot-two package who just happens to own an island.

Meanwhile, emotional truth is the stuff that hits you right in the sternum when you weren’t expecting it. It’s the sudden, sharp recognition of yourself in a moment—a line of dialogue, a look between characters, a fear you’ve never said out loud. It’s when your brain knows it’s fiction, but your heart doesn’t care. Emotional truth doesn’t need realistic scaffolding to feel true. In fact, sometimes the more “realistic” a story tries to be, the more emotionally disingenuous it feels. We’ve all read those books where people sit around drinking bitter coffee and avoiding their feelings for 300 pages. That’s not truth, that’s emotional constipation.

Romance doesn’t work that way. It tells the truth at full volume—sometimes with gentle kisses, sometimes with the kind of silence that feels like a wound. It builds a world where the emotional logic is more valuable than plausibility. Where the connection is what we care about, not the trauma-to-growth ratio on the spreadsheet. And yeah, maybe the plot involves a werewolf duke who runs a haunted inn. But if that story cracks open something real inside you—if it shows you what grief, desire, fear, or forgiveness actually feel like—then that werewolf duke is doing more emotional heavy lifting than most literary fiction.

Why “Unrealistic” Isn’t the Insult People Think It Is

“Unrealistic” gets thrown at romance like it’s a mic drop. As if someone just uncovered a scandal and now we’re all supposed to pack up our tropes and go home.

Oh, no—the wounded assassin with a secret heart of gold would never fall for the virgin librarian he was hired to kill! What a shocking revelation. Thank you, Chad. Go sit back down with your Jack Murphy manifesto and keep believing emotional intelligence is a global conspiracy.

Here’s the thing—when people call romance unrealistic, what they usually mean is, it centers things I’ve been taught to dismiss. Feelings. Hope. Intimacy that isn’t transactional. Communication that doesn’t end in a slow descent into mutual resentment. That love, especially the kind that heals, might be something worth striving for.

“Unrealistic” is often (but not always) code for “not masculine enough to be taken seriously.” It’s not emotionally distant. It doesn’t keep its feelings tucked beneath five layers of silence and literary acclaim. Romance doesn’t apologize for wanting more than that.

Furthermore, real life isn’t all that realistic either. People ghost each other without explanation, fall in love in three days, stay married for forty years out of habit, and make entire life decisions based on how someone looked at them across a room once. Real life is impulsive, absurd, and utterly irrational.

If romance is guilty of heightening that absurdity, it’s only because it’s aiming for emotional clarity—not factual accuracy. When I write, I don’t ask, “Would this happen in real life?” I ask, “Would someone feel this way in real life?” And if the answer is yes, I’ll build the world around it—however wild it has to be. Emotional truth often lives in the implausible.

Maybe “unrealistic” isn’t the insult they think it is. Maybe it’s just how the heart tells a story when it’s not worried about being judged. So, if you think it’s unrealistic, awesome. That means it’s not trying to mimic life, it’s trying to mean something. And I’ll take meaning over mimicry any day.

The Role of Fantasy in Telling the Truth

Escapism gets a bad rap, especially when it’s women doing the escaping. (I’ve never heard the same criticisms of Stallone movies.)

Romance is often dismissed as fluff because it doesn’t keep both feet on the ground. It’s idealistic. It dares to make space for joy, for hope, for futures that feel better than what we’ve been handed. And that makes people uncomfortable, especially the ones who believe “serious” stories require everyone to suffer quietly.

In my blog post titled I Don’t Write Just to Escape, I said, “I don’t escape to avoid the truth. I escape so I can face it without flinching.”

Romance readers already know this. They’re not fooled by the magic castle or the sexy alien overlord. They know the difference between literal realism and emotional resonance. They’re not here for logistics; they’re here for feeling. And they know when that feeling rings true, even if the setting is on a moon made of obsidian and sexual tension.

In my own writing, I use fantasy and dystopia to push emotional truths to the surface. Because when the stakes are life or death—when love is rebellion, when agency is a weapon, when the world is watching you fall apart or fall in love—it forces the emotional core into high relief. You can’t hide in a setting like that, and neither can your characters.

That moment doesn’t need to happen in our world to be real. It just needs to reflect something true—something felt.

Nobody Wants to Read About Doing Taxes in a Dystopia

(Except my boyfriend, who would absolutely enjoy spreadsheet versions of my novels.)

There’s a particular kind of writing that tries so hard to be “real” it forgets to be anything else. You’ve seen it—the stories so committed to accuracy that they forget to move you. The contemporary romance where every conversation sounds like a corporate Slack thread. The post-apocalyptic survival tale that spends six pages on wound care and none on human connection. That’s not realism. That’s a user manual in drag.

When a story leans too far into literal realism, it often ends up feeling emotionally hollow. It becomes a transcript of events rather than a transformation.

In contrast, the stories that stick—the ones readers dog-ear and carry because they recognize something personal in them—those are the ones that may not look like real life, but feel like it in all the places that matter. Because most people don’t want a perfect mirror of their lives, they want emotional shape, reflection, catharsis. We don’t read to relive how awkward and unresolved everything is. We read to make meaning out of it.

That’s the difference between reality and resonance. One is facts. The other is truth. I don’t know about you, but if I have to choose between the two, I’ll take the truth every time.

Emotional Honesty as the Core of All Good Romance

You can have all the world building, plot twists, heaving bosoms, and high-stakes conflict you want, but if the emotional core is hollow, the whole thing collapses. Readers might enjoy the action. They might admire the prose. But what they remember is the moment a character flinches when someone gets too close. The words not said. The soft ache of being seen for the first time. That’s what sticks.

For me, emotional honesty is everything. I don’t write tidy characters with perfect communication skills and fully processed trauma. I create characters who want to love, but don’t always know how. Who lash out, shut down, dissociate, numb, pretend. People who come into love carrying baggage, and sometimes armor, and then they have to decide what to do with both.

That truth lives in the dialogue. In the trauma responses. In the emotional arcs that don’t just go from “sad” to “better,” but from guarded to brave, from numb to present. Healing in my books isn’t linear. It’s not always pretty. But it’s earned.

Dystopian romance, in particular, lets me sharpen that honesty into something more visceral. Because the people who hold the power aren’t hiding it—they’re using it. Vulnerability feels reckless. Trust feels like rebellion, because choosing to trust someone in a world built on fear and control means you’re pushing back. And love? Love feels like the kind of risk that could either save you or ruin you.

In that way, the genre becomes a mirror. The systems might look exaggerated—corrupt governments, repressive regimes, collapsed societies—but the emotions? The imbalance of power, the cost of autonomy, the hunger for intimacy in a world that punishes softness? That’s real. That’s now.

Sometimes, the most satisfying way to speak truth is through metaphor, through allegory, through fantasy, and through romance that dares to hold both darkness and desire in the same hand. That’s the magical thing about emotional honesty. It doesn’t require realism. It requires courage.

The Sacred Lie: Why We Need Both

“Fiction is the lie that tells the truth.” It’s been said so often it’s practically a cliché, but like a lot of good clichés, it’s true. Romance gets dismissed because it tells lies that are beautiful. The timing is too perfect. The declarations are too eloquent. The sex is improbably meaningful for people who just met three days ago. But those “lies” serve a purpose. They carve out a space for emotional truths.

Romance doesn’t just lie for entertainment. It lies with intention. It tells us what we wish could be true, and then asks us to sit with why it isn’t. Or why it used to be. Or what would have to change in the world (or ourselves) to make it real. That tension, between what we long for and what we’ve lived through, is the sweet spot. That’s where the ache comes from. That’s where the catharsis lives.

I don’t need a story to reflect my exact circumstances. I need it to delve deeper. The contradiction of being human. Wanting things we’re afraid to ask for. Hoping for love in a world that constantly warns us not to trust it. Building something tender on top of our ruins. That’s what romance does when it’s at its best. It tells a necessary lie, and in doing so, reveals the truth lovelier than anything else could.

Final Thoughts: Write the Truth, Even if It’s in a Spaceship

Here’s the part where I speak to fellow writers, especially the ones who are worried about being taken seriously. You don’t owe realism to anyone.

You owe your story emotional truth. That’s it. Don’t kill your book trying to prove it could happen. If it feels true in the chest, if it says something real about what it means to want, to hurt, to change, to hope, then it belongs. Even if it happens in space. Even if the love interest is half-demon. Even if they kiss in the midst of an asteroid field while the world burns behind them. Realism won’t save a hollow book. But emotional honesty? That will carry even the wildest plot all the way home.

So, write a beautiful lie. Tell an impossible story. Make it feel true. That’s the part they always underestimate. That’s the true power of romance.