I’m pulling out my crystal ball to speculate on what romance will look like post-pandemic. What trends can we expect, and what tropes will we see on the rise and which ones will drop off for a while? The crystal ball says:
1) Paranormal comeback
On the Fated Mates Podcast, Jen and Sarah have already been predicting that paranormal is going to have a renaissance, as it did during/after the recession of 2008, because we’re going to want the idea of something outside of us as humans to do the things that we aren’t able to do or to save us from bigger and badder monsters. So get ready for more werves and vamps and witches and other magical creatures!
2) Out forever
I’m calling it now: billionaires are out. I find it difficult to feel any sort of sympathy or kinship for billionaires right now. As we’ve seen with real-life billionaires, having that much money—more money than anyone could ever spend in a lifetime—and hoarding it when there are so many people who could benefit from spreading that wealth around isn’t befitting of a hero or a heroine. Whether they’re making the billions themselves or inheriting generational wealth, romance billionaires should be aware of their power and their moral imperative to use their wealth wisely, or not be billionaires at all.
And look, there will always be billionaires and rich people in romance—the security and freedom to not worry about money is a fantasy for most people—but if we're going to have them, let's have the kind who give so much of their money away that they lose their billionaire status, or the kind who is trying to make amends for their ancestors' greed, not the ones who Scrooge McDuck their way through life.
Similarly, in historicals, I think we’ll see more of the dukes and earls (and their romance-writer creators) grappling about where their inherited wealth and power come from. I don’t think we’ll ever get away from dukes and nobility being heroes in historical romance, but I definitely want to see more enlightened ones.
Also out: cops. I wrote the bulk of this at the end of May, but now, two weeks into June, we can easily say that cop/law enforcement stories are very much out of the question at the moment and are not hero material. Until we see a big change in the way cops treat people, particularly BIPOC, and/or we get a real systemic change in modern policing, I don't expect there will be many romances featuring cops as heroes/heroines for a good long time.
3) Forced proximity dip
I know forced proximity is up there on most people’s top tropes lists, but after being under lockdown for so long, it’s just not going to appeal for a while. We've now lived it, so the thrill of it is gone. Romance writers will have to find new ways to get their main characters together to bang/talk it out—which is great! Innovation! But never fear: forced proximity will never go away (it’s too good of a trope!); it’ll just be on a temporary downswing.
4) Small town slowdown vs big city boom
After being in quarantine for so long and not being able to be out in the world, when things lift, we’re gonna party. So fewer small town romances—tight-knit towns will feel too claustrophobic. We’ll see more city-set romances, nightlife, clubs, parties—it’s the Roaring Twenties all over again.
5) Greater disparity between on-the-page sex and closed-door romance
I think we’ll see romance writers pushing the limits more in terms of sex on the page. After the constant denial of opportunities for touch and sex with other people in quarantine, people are gonna get WILD out there. Hedonism is going to be big, and romance writers—especially erotic romance writers—are going to be in their element writing it.
For those who don't write on-the-page sex, touch is going to be so important and is going to mean so much more. (Those who have been living alone during the pandemic have talked about how desperately they want to hug someone—and honestly, humans aren't supposed to live this way. We're social creatures and we need each other.) The first touch in romance is always pretty electric, especially in historicals because there are fewer opportunities to casually touch someone in most historical settings that we see (see: the infamous Darcy hand flex), but even in contemporaries post-pandemic, I think we'll see more of the first touch being a huge deal.
6) The question we’ve all been wondering…
I’ve been thinking a lot about this one: Will romance writers acknowledge the pandemic in their contemporaries, or will we pretend like it never happened? I can’t come up with any popular media from the 1920s that mention the 1918-20 flu pandemic. It’s like it was forgotten or, at the very least, completely overshadowed by life getting back to normal after the horror and destruction of WWI. The response to the war (and presumably the pandemic?) is clear in the carefree attitude of the ’20s.
I think it’s likely that romance will more often pretend the pandemic never happened and life just went on as “normal.” For one thing, it would be hard to write about when we’re still going to be dealing with the fallout from it and figuring out how to process it in real life. Whether it’s simply having had to quarantine or dealing with the loss of loved ones or wrapping our minds around the scope of the damage post-pandemic, wrestling with that in our own heads is going to be difficult enough without trying to capture it as background in a novel. With a few years’ distance, romance will probably start referring to the pandemic, but not right away.