At night, I eagerly looked forward to reading the romances I downloaded from the Los Angeles Public Library. Some I devoured in three nights. Others I turned to when anxiety woke me up at 4 a.m. There was safety in the routine of knowing that every story I read ended happily; I didn’t have to wonder if the people I read about were hurting.
Romance novels also helped me with anxiety, depression, and loneliness.
As the height of the pandemic wore on, I slipped into depression. At first, I dismissed my symptoms—irritability, hopelessness, and physical exhaustion—as caregiver burnout mixed with stress from writing about the rapid rise in anti-Asian sentiments. I tried melatonin and meditation to help me relax, but reading romance worked better and seemed to pause the constant anxiety loop in my brain. To be clear, romance novels are not a substitute for mental health treatment—it ultimately took a combination of medication and therapy to help me manage my depression and anxiety—but the stories I read did help me unwind at a time when I desperately needed it.
It turns out, there’s some science to support the mental boost I got from my fictional companions. A 2022 study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that reading books was an effective coping strategy for emergency health care workers during the pandemic, reducing feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression. I would never compare my situation to theirs, and, again, you can’t read your way out of a mental health condition, but it’s encouraging to know that books can, in fact, make you feel a bit better when life gets dark and overwhelming.
And romance novels may be particularly helpful when it comes to loneliness and isolation. In a 2013 study in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, researchers talked to readers of specific book genres—domestic fiction, romance, science-fiction/fantasy, and suspense/thriller—to understand how they might pick up on social and emotional nonverbal cues. Participants were asked to “decode emotions from black-and-white cropped images of people’s eyes” and the researchers found that romance readers “tended to perform better on picking up social cues” compared to readers of other genres.
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Translation: Reading romantic novels might help make you feel more connected to other people, Katrina Fong, PhD, a researcher of social and personality psychology and the lead author of the study, tells SELF. And it’s not all that surprising, considering that romance, more than other genres, focuses so heavily on relationships. “Reading stories and connecting to the characters can help meet our personal psychological needs,” Dr. Fong explains. “It’s possible that connecting to fictional characters can create a sense of closeness that staves off loneliness, especially if characters feel like real people to readers.”
Of course, this is just one study, and it didn’t specifically look at whether romance stories made readers feel less lonely or isolated. But it does suggest that the strong sense of connectedness I felt when I got to hang out with my romance-novel characters may have been the reason these books eased my loneliness during a very isolating time.
I felt emotionally validated by the characters.
Unlike the romance novels I read as a teen, my new reads had relatable characters. I saw myself in Chloe, the perpetual planner in Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert. As someone who married her BFF, I understood Alex and Poppy’s best friends-to-lovers relationship in Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation. And as I was grappling with caregiver burnout and depression, I felt understood by Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle, a deeply vulnerable novel centered on Anna Sun, a young woman who is caring for her sick mother, and a guy she meets for a one-night stand.
Source: SELF
