There’s plenty of content for all you steamy romance lovers, but not near as much for those who prefer behind-the-bedroom-door romance.

Something you probably noticed in the description of Romance Lovers Anonymous is the note that we’re all about romance here, but “minus the steam.”

If you’re a romance lover, you probably know what I mean here, but if you’re new to the genre, you might be a little confused. The steam I’m referring to here is, after all, not the kind that comes out of a boiling kettle. It is, though, the kind of steam that erupts from a romantic relationship when things start to reach a boiling point — the bedroom scenes, if you will.

So I wanted to explain a bit about what that means for Romance Lovers Anonymous, and why I want to create a place on the internet for all of us who appreciate a good romance with all the emotional tension, but a little less of the physical.

But first, a little background.

I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book that didn’t involve a romantic plotline. When I was in elementary school, my love for reading flourished and I devoured every book I could find at the library in our small little Tennessee town. Even then, most of the novels making up the massive stack I’d tote out to the minivan after a fruitful trip to the Spring Hill Public Library involved a romance of some sort.

My tastes evolved over time, of course — I eventually came to abandon Anne of Green Gables for Meg Cabot’s more sophisticated (at least in my unsophisticated brain) Princess Diaries series, or E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. But even these new books involved romance, despite their entire plotlines not centralizing around two protagonists falling in love.

It was then, during my Meg Cabot phase, that I discovered Sara Dessen’s novels — all of which fall decidedly into the, as I will deem it in this edition of Noteworthy, ‘straight-up romance’ category. As I read through every one of Dessen’s novels that were available at said Spring Hill Public Library, I quickly ran out of further options in the very small two-shelf wide young adult section, and my foray into classic literature began.

Now, I was reading Jane Austen’s entire repertoire as I hung over the foot of the bed in my dark-blue bedroom, and recommending that all of my friends read Jane Eyre as soon as they could get their hands on a copy (unsurprisingly, the book was of little interest to a bunch of high schoolers who were not literarily inclined.) This was also the same time period during which I was introduced to inspirational historical romance through my mother’s collection of Janette Oke books. She’d kept series after series of the Canadian author’s novels on her bookshelf since she was in high school, and decided to pass the literary torch on to me.

And thus, my love affair with the romance genre was cemented into place.

And an internal debate ensued.

I found myself entranced by the different ways authors portrayed love in their novels. As you can imagine, I saw quite the spectrum — from squeaky-clean Christian novels like the Love Comes Softly series, to the historically chaste romance of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, to teenagers without fully developed frontal lobes freaking out about sex on every other page in Teen Idol. It was a lot to digest as I was fluttering between too many different romance novel worlds, and it left me debating which genre — and which approach to romance — appealed to me as a reader the most.

By and large, I’ve settled on romance novels with a low level of steaminess throughout (more on what the industry thinks about that in a minute.) That’s usually my safe place when it comes to reading. I like to think of this safe space as the old library of a Victorian manor lined with classic books — and the entirety of the historical fiction section of the Christian bookstore — when looking for something to read.

But I’m still not entirely sure where I land on the debate between sizzling and sweet romance.

Especially now, as I’m starting to write romance.

If you’re familiar with the romance genre, you’ll know that there are a lot of different subgenres within romance as an umbrella genre. These subgenres are often referred to as romance ‘categories,’ and if you write for one of said categories, you write “category romance.”

There are…a lot…of different categories within romance, but most category romance novels are short(ish) at somewhere in the range of 50–70k words. The different categories that abound in romance also have their own tropes and plots that pretty much must be followed to a T. Some of the categories include inspirational (Christian-themed romances), sweet/clean romance, sizzling romance…you get the picture (but a good place to see some of the categories out there is to look on Harlequin’s Submittable — they have several different lines of category romances, and Harlequin is basically the standard when it comes to publishing romance.)

The interesting thing about these categories of romance is that they all come with different expectations. When a reader picks up a Harlequin Desire novel, they are expecting some steamy bedroom scenes. When a reader picks up a Harlequin Heartwarming novel, they are expecting a clean Hallmark-movie-style story.

There’s room in the romance world for both wild levels of steaminess and nothing more than a quick kiss between lovers.

And that’s what I find interesting.

You see, I’ve read both sides of the proverbial romance coin.

Although I haven’t mentioned it yet, I have an eternal love for the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. Outlander falls decidedly on the steamy side of the romance spectrum. In fact, there are times when the books get so steamy that I skip a page or two (it’s all about personal preference, here — feel free not to skip if that’s your cup of steaming-hot tea.)

I am much more inclined to read through an entire book, not skipping any particularly sizzling scenes, when it is Hallmark-movie-level clean.

Again, it’s just personal preference.

And apparently, if you take a little stroll through Harlequin’s Submittable page as aforementioned, there truly is an audience and a market for writers on both sides of the spectrum. When you think about it, there are examples of each in both books, movies, and anything else you can think of (i.e., for every Hallmark movie, there’s a 50 Shades of Grey equivalent hitting the big screen near you.)

There’s really something out there for everyone who has even the slightest interest in reading a romance novel. As if to prove my point, one of my good friends has recently started reading paranormal romance, and she’s someone who would never have claimed any interest, feigned or otherwise, in reading romance up until a few months ago.

So here, the focus will be on romance minus the steam.

There’s something out there for everyone, and this particular slice of the internet will be more for those of us who love a good ole sweet romance. We’ll talk all things Hallmark and inspirational romance. We might even throw Outlander in for good measure once in a while but without a focus on the bedroom scenes.

Romance is for everyone, and we all deserve the right to our own preferences. But for Romance Lovers Anonymous, the plan is to stick with the less steamy side of romance because there’s a lot to say for this particular genre — more than we can ever even start to say here.

So if you’re a fan of sweet romance and want to stick around, stay tuned for some interesting topics on everything from historical romance to Hallmark to Harlequin to your favorite romantic TV show. This is your spot on Medium for all things ooey-gooey romance, minus the steam.

Hope you stay a while!

Previously published in Romance Lover’s Anonymous