Why We Can't Stop Reading Love Stories

Whenever I enter a bookstore, I always find new romantic novels. Whenever I open Netflix, I see new recommendations for romantic films. People who don’t even like romance are still invested in the subplots of romance in a story. People care so much about fictional relationships, and it makes me wonder why. Why do humans keep returning to love stories? Why do we care so much about fictional relationships? I think they provide something for us, and that’s why we keep returning to them, generation after generation.

A simple explanation can be that romance is entertaining, and I admit that it is entertaining. But this alone cannot explain why love stories occupy such a privileged position in human culture. No other genre is given the same amount of attention. Neither can any other genre make us feel the same emotional intensity that we feel with romantic stories. I find people rooting for fictional characters as if something meaningful is at stake inside their own lives. When fictional characters get reunited, it comforts them. When they get rejected, it hurts them. Somehow, the longing and yearning of fictional characters becomes their own yearning and longing.

I think psychology offers us one answer. Human beings are dependent on relationships. For example, other animals can survive without years of care from other animals. But humans cannot survive without years of care from others, As the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott once said: “There is no such thing as a baby”, there must always be parents or caregivers alongside them. Even before we learn language, morality, or our own identity, we learn about attachment. We learn whether anyone will come to us when we cry. Whether someone delights in our existence or not. Will someone comfort us when we are afraid? For us humans, love is not just romantic; it is biologically intertwined in our existence. The inherent need to be chosen, protected, and emotionally held is built into the architecture of being human.

When we grow up and become adults, this need metamorphoses into a need to be seen. As adults, we no longer cry for a parent in the middle of the night. But many of us want that someone will understand us without endless explanations, and romance is the symbolic expression of that hope. We are not only looking for affection, but we are also looking for recognition. We want another person to say to us that, yes, I see you for who you are, and I will choose you anyway.

This also explains why the most memorable romantic stories never focus on physical affection. My favorite romance movie, Before Sunrise, in it there are just two strangers who spend one night trying to understand each other’s inner world. The whole movie is just about celebrating each other’s existence. And after years of watching that movie, the only thing I remember about that movie is the deeply intimate conversation that the two characters had. The romance was just simply the surface. Beneath it lay the universal wish to be deeply known without being abandoned. Before Sunrise is compelling because it is actually a story about recognition.

Martin Buber explained in his work that human life becomes most meaningful through genuine encounters with another person. He made a distinction between relationships. According to him, there are two kinds of relationships. In one, we treat other people as objects, and in another relationship, we meet them as fully human subjects. When romance is at its healthiest, it is the second encounter generally. But whether such complete recognition is ever fully possible, that’s another question. But the longing itself remains powerful.

This is also the reason why we love unfinished love stories. Stories like White Nights by Dostoyevsky aren’t about successful relationships or genuine emotional understanding. They are about longing and yearning itself. Sometimes the desire becomes more fulfilling than the fulfillment itself. Freud argued that this desire survives only because it remains unsatisfied. Once it is satisfied, the fantasy loses its intensity. The longing allows us to keep our imagination working, and because of that, sometimes the beloved becomes larger than life because it feels so extraordinary.

But there is also a hidden danger inside our obsession with romance.

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