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I’ve always been obsessed with happily ever afters.

It started when I was five, with Belle and the Beast singing to each other in the snow. Then it was the Nora Ephron VHSs I watched on constant rotation with my dad every other weekend. Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries dominated my eighth-grade daydreams, and soon, I was devouring every young-adult novel with a romance subplot I could get my hands on. (Yes, Twilight included.) I adored the meet-cutes and the misunderstandings and the magic, and I based my ideas about love around the stories I consumed.

At sixteen, using a DOS computer my mom found at a garage sale, I wrote my own young adult fantasy novel with an angsty love triangle. It was awful but at the time I genuinely believed I had written a love story for the ages. I thought I knew what love was.

I carried this torch for happily ever afters through my twenties, but my passion stayed firmly in the realm of fiction. My own love life was all but non-existent. Sure, I forced myself to maintain my dating app profiles. I occasionally followed through on first dates with men I met on these apps — men I was never attracted to but who seemed nice enough. There were second dates and sometimes third dates, but any time I got the slightest whiff that a guy might want to get more serious, I ghosted. Fled as fast as I could. Something always felt not quite right with these men. And there definitely wasn’t any magic.

So, I worked sixty hours a week as a high school English teacher, staying too busy for dating or self-reflection. I ignored my mental health. I refused to go to therapy because I didn’t want to unpack why I hated dating men. I figured I was too messy for love, anyway. Most nights, I stayed in reading my books and wondering why my life didn’t look like the lives of the characters contained in those pages. Romance novels eventually changed everything. Even though romance was at the center of all my media, for some reason, I’d never been interested in actual romance novels, in the expansive genre solely dedicated to happily ever afters. That is, until 2018 when my best friend Michelle insisted I read The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang. On the surface, it has a classic rom-com premise: a reverse Pretty Woman where the inexperienced female protagonist hires a sex worker to help her build sexual confidence and ends up falling for him. But inside the pages of that book, I discovered something I had never seen in my rabid pursuit of happy endings: Stella, the female protagonist, is autistic. It was the first time I had ever seen neurodivergence represented on the page in a love story — a story where a woman with a brain like mine gets a happily ever after.

I saw so much of myself in Stella, and that representation sparked a vital realization: the happily ever afters I was raised on were never about women like me. Sure, those heroines were often quirky, often clumsy, and always lacking in confidence. But Bella Swan wasn’t neurodivergent. Mia from The Princess Diaries wasn’t navigating clinical depression or generalized anxiety disorder. And absolutely no one was queer. (Though I didn’t know why this was a problem for me quite yet.)

But modern romance is a space where women thrive. They have interesting careers, robust interpersonal relationships beyond their romantic partnership, and rich interior lives. They confront past trauma and learn to live as their healthiest selves. These books are feminist and sex-positive and diverse and so incredibly fun. Even better, these characters don’t have to be waifish manic pixies: they can be fat or chronically ill or anxious. They can be confident and career focused. They can be real people. I loved it. I went on a Jasmine Guillory binge and felt elated by her rom-coms. Writers like Chloe Liese and Talia Hibbert and Olivia Dade were out there writing stories I didn’t know I needed, stories that reflected my own struggles and joys. It was about the first son of the President of the United States falling in love with a Prince of England. When I first opened Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston in May 2019, I didn’t expect to relate to the characters. I was searching for light, escapist fun. And then McQuiston peered directly into my soul and called me out with one brutally honest line:

“Straight people, he thinks, probably don’t spend this much time convincing themselves that they’re straight.”

I remember reading this line and feeling itchy with defensiveness. Of course, I’d wondered about myself. I had thoughts I’d categorically repressed. Because I wasn’t… I couldn’t be… In Red, White, and Royal Blue, I saw an adult character questioning his sexuality. I saw unbridled queer joy and indomitable queer love. I saw my own heart reflected back to me for the first time, and I understood why my love story was never going to match the books of my youth.

I wasn’t straight. And maybe — just maybe — that was okay. Maybe it was actually as beautiful as my favorite romance novel. I decided to sit down and write a novel that couldn’t be more different than the hetero, YA fantasy books I wrote as a teen. I wanted to write a story about someone like me — though I disguised myself as a ridiculously handsome tech genius with abs who goes on a reality dating show to salvage his reputation. I wrote the first draft of my debut novel The Charm Offensive in six days. The story poured out of me, unfiltered and unencumbered by my expectations of what I thought a romance should look like. When I finished it, I found a book about mental health and neurodivergence staring back at me. A story about queer love and queer joy. I am thirty-five now, and I’m still obsessed with happily ever afters, but my understanding of what that means and what that looks like has expanded greatly. I have been in therapy for two and a half years with a fantastic queer therapist who’s helped me work toward becoming my healthiest self and learning to love my brain. I recently got engaged to my partner, Jordan, and she’s even better than fiction. And I write queer romance novels full-time. Reading romance helped me feel seen and validated and worthy. Writing romance feels nothing shy of radical. In my books, gay characters and asexual characters, characters with mental health challenges, and characters who are neurodivergent — characters who are exactly like me — find love. Sharing these stories feels like standing up in front of the world and declaring that I deserve love.

And I do. You do, too.

My second novel, Kiss Her Once for Me, is a holiday rom-com about two women falling in love during a snow day in Portland. In my first book, I disguised myself in my characters. In this book, the main character Ellie is unabashedly me, and writing her a love story was so healing. There are so many queer romance novels available now, reflecting the diversity of the LGBTQIA+ experience. Sapphic novels like Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur and Delilah Gren Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake. Stories about queer men written by Kosoko Jackson, Timothy Janovsky, Chip Pons, and Alexis Hall. Nonbinary stories like Chef’s Kiss by TJ Alexander and Love and Other Disasters by local author Anita Kelly. Asexual stories like The Romantic Agenda by Claire Kann. Bisexual love stories like In the Event of Love by Courtney Kae and Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert.

I could obviously go on forever, but I’ll try to resist. Just know, there is a story out there for you, waiting to make you feel seen and validated and worthy. And if there isn’t, perhaps you could write your own.

When I was recently diagnosed with ADHD, I immediately turned to Lizzie Blake’s Best Mistake by Mazey Eddings — a romance novel about a woman with poorly managed ADHD — so I could see that part of myself represented on the page. So I could understand myself better by experiencing Lizzie’s journey alongside her. For me, that’s the true power of romance novels. Beneath the bubbly escapism and the grand gestures are empowering moments about real people doing the hard work it takes to be emotionally vulnerable with someone else. And they always, always end with joy. I think we could all use a little more of that these days.

If you’ve never picked up a romance novel before, I hope you will. You never know what part of your heart you will find reflected back to you. Alison Cochrun is a former high school English teacher and a current writer of queer love stories, including her debut novel, The Charm Offensive. She lives outside of Portland, Oregon with her giant dog and a vast collection of brightly colored books. She controversially believes Evermore is the greatest Christmas album of all time, and she’s probably sitting by a window right now hoping for snow. You can find her online at AlisonCochrun.com or on Instagram and Twitter at @AlisonCochrun.