Navigating Adult Romance Books as an Ace Reader

This post has been on my mind for about a year, but I’ve put it off because it felt like opening such a can of worms. With a resurgence in adult vs YA discourse on Twitter, though, as well as a recent report that YA sales are down, it felt like time.

A few disclaimers right up front.

Disclaimer #1: I don’t speak for all ace people. It’s a vast spectrum, and individual experiences vary drastically. I am asexual but alloromantic, and my comfort level with sex varies from repulsed to favorable, usually landing somewhere in the indifferent realm, just depending on the day.

Disclaimer #2: None of this is to say what’s currently on shelves is bad. It’s just that it’s not working for me. I don’t want to take away the books anyone else enjoys. I want everyone, myself included, to have access to books they like and for those books for them to be easy to identify. That’s it. No condemning any current books, only asking for other books to exist alongside what’s already there.

Disclaimer #3: I’m talking about trad publishing here. I recognize that self pub is often more accommodating, but I don’t know that world and can’t speak to it.

With those two points made, a little context. I was in high school as The Hunger Games and Twilight came out. I absolutely rode the wave of big-name YA titles as someone in the target audience. I’m 30 now. I’m not the target audience of YA anymore. I know this. I still read YA books, but I never expect them to be for me.

There’s a part of me that I think will always enjoy a good coming of age tale, but I’ve very much reached the point where I want to mix in books that resonate more with the adult aspects of my adult life. I want to, you know, read books for which I am the target audience. I’m not the target audience for YA anymore.

I don’t really feel like I’m the target audience for adult books either.

My reading is wild. I actually do enjoy book club/upmarket adult fiction and have for years. It’s not my escapist reading, though. For that, I turn to genre fiction, specifically SFF and romance. These are the genres that have not translated well to the adult market for me. I’m focusing on romance here since Aimee Davis has already covered most of my feelings on the SFF market. And I love romance stories. It’s been my most read genre in YA for years.

That love hasn’t translated to adult, and here are some of the reasons why.

Pacing

When I started reading adult romance, I noticed this trend where I blazed through the first half of the book only to find myself skimming the second half. Turns out, most of the second half of the book is just banging and third act breakup.

This seems like a good time to remind you of Disclaimer #2. I get that a lot of people are there for the sexytimes. I frequently hear that referred to as “the good stuff.” Again, glad that those readers have these books, but for me, that’s not the good stuff. Even the books I’ve liked pretty well, I hit this point where the characters have sex and I’m left thinking “I really wish I had like fifty more pages of them being pathetic over each other.”

For me, the will-they-won’t-they back and forth is the good stuff. The first act falling bit. Yet in almost every adult romance I’ve read, this portion of the book feels like it’s cut off prematurely to make room for sexytimes. This isn’t a universal truth, but in general this pacing is different from YA where we usually have a longer falling-in-love portion. And sex, if there is any, occurs later in the book and consumes less page real estate.

So yeah, lots of skimming the second half of adult romances once the entertaining-to-me portion is over.

Conflating Sexual and Romantic Chemistry

This isn’t all adult romances, of course, and YA is not exempt from having flat characters, but I’ve had an issue with a lot of my adult romance reads focusing on sexual chemistry at the cost of developing romantic chemistry. I guess for people who experience sexual and romantic attraction simultaneously, this conflation maybe makes more sense. It should also make sense that for me, someone who experiences romantic attraction but not sexual attraction, I personally put more stock in the romantic attraction than the sexual.

Another frequent thought I have while reading adult romance is “I get that they want to bang the love interest but like… do they like them as a person? What does being with them do for the character arc?”

Like I said, lack of chemistry exists in YA, but this is a problem I’ve encountered so much more trying to transition to adult. It feels like sometimes other aspects of the romance are allowed to slide as long as the sex scenes are hot, but for me, sexy isn’t enough to carry a story.

Blatant Hostility

In fairness, I have a running mental list of overt and subtle ways YA books have promoted hostility towards a-spec people. But for me, it has been so much more frequent and severe in the adult sphere.

There are a lot of microaggressions towards a-spec people. Insinuations that love/sex are the ultimate life achievement. Suggestions that a relationship is only as good as the sex. Treatment of sex and romance as being a universally human experience. Stereotyping people not interested in love/sex as alien or frigid or robotic. These microaggressions are so common in the adult romance sphere.

It’s not just the books themselves. It’s a lot of the community.

I respect that there’s a long history of shaming readers for enjoying sexual content. When I’m feeling generous, I attribute some of the bad behavior of romance readers to being a little too enthusiastically defensive of their right to enjoy books with sex in them.

But seriously, I have witnessed some garbage takes from Romancelandia.

I won’t get into these too much, but I’ve seen people be absolute jerks to readers who don’t want to read sexual content. They get accused of being puritanical or prude or immature. They’re screamed at for trying to censor readers even if all they said was that they personally would enjoy media with less sex.

Honestly, it’s exhausting and alienating to constantly witness this from the romance community. I appreciate that the community has had to fight to destigmatize the genre, but real sexual liberation has to include room for the choice not to engage with sexual content just as much as it has to include room for engaging with that content. There needs to be room for all of us.

Lack of Diversity

I enjoy reading books about non-ace characters plenty, but when I do want to read an ace romance… one that features a character like me finding love… they’re sparse. In YA and adult, ace romances are hard to find. In YA, they can be found, though, while in adult… not to erase a handful that do exist, but ace romances are *almost* non-existent.

Difficulty Finding Books

There are a lot of romance books out there, and probably some out there are more suited to what I’m looking for in a book. But if those books are this hard to find, that’s kind of also a problem. Reading for fun shouldn’t mean combing through dozens of things I don’t enjoy to find the handful I do enjoy.

You know the best tool I’ve found for trying to finding romance books with medium heat? I search Does It Bang?‘s tweets and the word “not” to try and find the ones that do not bang. Which is a pretty flawed system, to be honest. There’s no central database, no spreadsheet. Just tweets. The data is crowdsourced and often full of discrepancies. And while I appreciate why the definition is this way “is there an on page orgasm y/n” is a really vague metric to try and use for figuring out heat levels.

Yet this is the best approach I’ve found.

Oh, and the other fun part of doing it that way is that I also get to see the comments with people complaining how all the books I am interested in are less good because they don’t bang. Your preference for more heat is totally fair, but it’s kind of a bummer to have to see that just trying to find books I like.

But Kyra, why don’t you just go read “clean” romance?

For one, a lot of these are published by Christian presses or presses with “traditional” values that perpetuate queerphobia and gender essentialism that I have no interest in reading.

Beyond that… maybe I just want medium heat books. I exist as a medium heat sort of person, it’s fair to want to see medium heat books. There’s a world of spice between what we see in sweet romances and multi-chapter on-page sex scenes. Yet it is so hard to find books between those extremes.

In conclusion

I really want to like adult romance. Enough to try and make it work instead of deciding it’s just not for me. And the thing is, some of it should be for me. Romance sells more than any other genre of book. It’s a huge market, and surely it can make space for someone like me. I’m not saying every book needs to be for me. But shouldn’t some of them be?

Just to reiterate Disclaimer #2 one more time, I’m not asking the entire romance genre to bend to my preferences. I want the people to like romance the way it is to still have their choice of books. All I’m suggesting is that

1. We should have more books available at a greater variety of heat levels
2. We should make it easier for readers to find books with the heat levels they like
3. We shouldn’t moralize or shame people for liking more or less heat than we do

In a lot of ways, asking for shelf space echoes the larger cry for inclusion from a-spec readers. We deserve spaces on the shelf and in our lives where we are valued and where we’re not asked to compromise our comfort zone just to have a seat at the table.

It’s really not that much to ask for.