I grew up in the era of rom-coms – the ’90s and early 2000s seemed to be the golden age for the genre. Meet-cutes, friends-to-lovers, second chance love, all the tropes were covered in ways that I fell for time and time again.
Movies like Never Been Kissed, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Four Weddings and a Funeral and You’ve Got Mail were firm favourites.
The female protagonists whose shoes I continuously put myself in were nothing like me
But as I got older it began to dawn on me that none of the couples looked like the people who surrounded me. And the female protagonists whose shoes I continuously put myself in were nothing like me. And that’s because the heroes in the films and romance novels I was consuming were all white.
It’s something the industry at large seems to have become aware of, because things have begun to change. Now there are more People of Colour (POC) as romantic heroes in rom-coms.
Take the blockbuster YA romance book The Summer I Turned Pretty, written by Jenny Han. When the novel came out 14 years ago, the protagonist on the cover was depicted as a white woman. But when it was transferred into a TV series for Amazon last year, to a mixed-race teen who has a Korean mother and a white father.
Han went on to also write the popular teen romance trilogy To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, which became a Netflix miniseries.
In both books, Han’s Asian characters have white love interests – something she has been . She told : “I understand the frustration and I share that frustration of wanting to see more Asian-American men in media. For this, all I can say is this is the story that I wrote.”
A similar criticism was raised against season one of the Amazon series Modern Love: although there were POC love interests, they were all men in relationships with white women. No women of colour were represented on the show.
As writer : “I cried because, as a Black woman, the show made me feel anything but romantic. With its total exclusion of Black, brown, and Indigenous women as love interests, I felt invisible and dehumanized.”
With its total exclusion of Black, brown, and Indigenous women as love interests, I felt invisible and dehumanized
Reading that made me sad, because the whole point of rom-coms is to give people hope – not leave them feeling completely excluded.
Season two of Modern Love did try to make amends with more women of colour represented, but it’s still incredibly rare to see shows or read mainstream romance novels where both protagonists are POC.
It was something I was conscious of when I first started writing my novel . I noticed that there weren’t many books where both the protagonists were brown. I wanted to write a book that explored how two people can come from a similar cultural background (in the case of my novel, they are both Pakistani) but still see the world in completely different ways – mostly due to how they are brought up and their circumstances in life.
Saman Shad's novel "The Matchmaker" Source: Supplied
In my book, the female protagonist, Saima, is raised by her single mother in Sydney’s western suburbs. She has a tough start, mostly because of the circumstances surrounding her parents’ break-up and the struggle her Pakistani mother encounters to get herself and a young Saima back on track. Meanwhile, Kal, the male protagonist, grows up in Sydney’s upper north shore. He has wealthy, loving parents who send him to private school, and his job as a consultant means he retains much of the wealth he was used to growing up.
Just because both our protagonists are brown doesn’t mean that a surprising meet-cute, friends-to-lovers and second chance love tropes aren’t included
But this is a rom-com, after all, and there are plenty of romantic moments and laughs along the way. Just because both our protagonists are brown doesn’t mean that a surprising meet-cute, friends-to-lovers and second chance love tropes aren’t included. Of course they are!
I miss the rom-coms that I grew up watching, but that doesn’t mean I want to go back to a point where only a certain type of couple embodied the true meaning of romance. It’s time we continued on the path of increased representation in mainstream books, TV shows and movies. After all, love is a universal feeling that isn’t bound by culture, religion or background, so the more inclusive the romance genre can be, the better.
is an author and freelance writer. Her debut novel, , is out now through Penguin Australia.
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