I love, love, love, love romance novels (pun intended). I’ve been reading them faithfully since I was 12 years old (we’ll ignore the brief period in my late twenties when I eschewed romance for “quality literary” fiction) and since I now write romances too, I doubt I’ll ever stop loving them and reading them.

The same cannot be said for romance movies, sadly.

Of course, if we want to get technical, there is no “romance” category for movies. There’s romantic comedies (rom-coms) and romantic dramas. Famous rom-coms include When Harry Met Sally, Wedding Crashers, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Romantic dramas include Titanic, A Walk to Remember, Love Story, and Blue Valentine. Some of these movies are good. Some of these movies are bad.

And it’s very, very rare for me to actually like any of them.

Let’s start with the issue I have with rom-coms. I feel like most of them focus more on the “com” part and less on the “rom” part. It’s as if the writer(s) thought, hey, this is just a boring love story. Let’s spice it up by adding a hilarious scene where someone throws up. Or has to go to the bathroom but it’s occupied. Or someone gets sick. Or someone breaks a body part. So then we have a movie where the love story is shoved to the side to make room for all sorts of “funny” bits that add nothing to the main plot. I don’t mind an amusing scene here or there in a rom-com but I really hate when the focus is taken off two people falling in love. That is what I want to see when I watch a romantic movie: two people realizing how much they love each other, not scene after scene of pratfalls and high-jinks.

The issue I have with romantic drama movies is that there are no happy endings. I exaggerate slightly because I know there are some romantic drama movies out there that end with the couple riding off into the sunset together. But they are few and far between. If a romantic movie is a drama, I can almost guarantee that it will end with one half of the couple dying or the couple apart for whatever stupid reason. I watch romance specifically BECAUSE I want a happy ending. I know a lot of relationships in the real world don’t work. I know a lot of people find their “soul mate” but then break up or divorce. When I’m watching fiction, I want to believe that this specific couple can and will make it. I want to see at the end of an hour and a half or two hours of non-stop conflict that they’re going to be together forever. But that rarely happens, which is why when I notice that a romance movie I’m interested in is considered a drama, I almost always skip it.

Maybe one day Hollywood will understand that many consumers like myself prefer more romance and less comedy, more happy endings and less realistic ones. I can only hope.