Let me float my theory that romance is all about power.
I feel like that seems like a very cynical thing for a romance editor to say, but I promise it’s not quite as bad as it sounds!
More specifically, I think romance is about power and parity and balance. (Is that making it a little bit better?) And this should work for any relationship, whether it’s straight or queer, or if it’s a couple or more than two people.
Power isn’t about physical strength or money or social capital, but really about one person having a stronger position over another at different points in the story. And what happens in romance novels is that the main characters are constantly jockeying for position over the other and eventually coming to balance each other out so that they share the same amount of power and one isn’t dominating the other.
If you’ve been around me for even just a little while, you’ll know my favourite book of all time is Pride and Prejudice (#basicbitch, but zero shame about that), one of the foundational texts for romance. Darcy and Elizabeth are perhaps not matched in socio-economic power (and also in terms of gender, because patriarchy, which I’ll come back to), but they are matched in terms of wit and the power they have within their initially combative relationship. Every interaction is one-upping each other each time to prove their power, until the end where they finally figure things out and their power dynamic evens out. The internal power dynamic eventually comes to parity, and that’s where the HEA happens.
P&P is the blueprint for this, but all romances are playing out this dynamic, no matter if there’s also an external power dynamic between the characters—for example, in a rivals-to-lovers workplace romance where they’re gunning for the same job. This dynamic usually evens itself out or is removed entirely in order to bring the partnership into parity again.
And as always in romance, the strength and stakes of the story are actually in the internal conflict, which is where the power struggle is, whether it’s in terms of wanting more communication or more vulnerability or deeper understanding of each other. The romance itself happens when the more powerful one in the relationship (whoever it is at a particular point in the story, because it’s almost always going to switch off throughout) is willing to surrender some of their power to the other(s) to balance it out.
Because we live in a patriarchal world, we already know that men inevitably have more power than women in this structure. In a hetero pairing, then, the man definitely has to realize (consciously or unconsciously) that the world is unfair to his partner and work to give over some of his power to her or even things out externally. (Obviously, it’s better if he can make it so that it’s better for all women, rather than just his, but sometimes he’s constrained by other power structures beyond him.)
So, as an author, your job is to make sure that your MCs are constantly jockeying for power in their relationship (this is basically conflict) and then bringing them together so that they’re sharing equal amounts of power in terms of their personal dynamic.
Honestly, every romance novel I can think of plays this theory out. Am I wrong? Am I too cynical? Do you agree? Disagree?