M4F Any girls into slow and passionate foreplay and then to rough and aggressive ??

who have visited the home page of this blog might be wondering why an editor who doesn't work with dark romance is writing about it.

But I wouldn't be a romance editor worth my salt if I didn't do my best to learn about every sub-genre, including dark romance. I have to know about its tropes, trends, and reader expectations, because romance is not a vacuum. Nothing exists in isolation, and if I want to stay up to date on the genre as a whole, that requires dialing down into each part of it.

So, dark romance. You've probably heard of it. It's all over BookTok.

But what does "dark" really mean?

Why is it called dark romance? The sub-genre gets its name from the content of the books within it, which often explore darker themes, like abuse, captivity, and dubious consent. Dark romances don't pull punches, either; many put trauma and suffering on the page. This is a change from the way trauma used to be handled in romance, when it was part of a character's backstory and might have b