Teen romances certainly do differ from adult romances in both plot and character. Adult romances have at their core the development of a male-female relationship that is meant to be true love, final love—hero and heroine will live happily and passionately ever after. Teen romances are also concerned with developing love, but nearly all of them imply that the one, true love is some years in the future and, as we shall see, not necessarily passionate. Teen romances are concerned with the beginnings of the romantic search, not with the final triumph. (91)
The promise held out by these romances is, paradoxically, not that passion and romance come with love, but rather that a comfortable, affectionate family life is the reward of love. Parents in these novels are affectionate and full of good advice, but they never speak to their daughters about their own experiences with love, even when asked directly. They are full of familial love, but not romantic love or even, apparently, the memory of it. These romances are not selling romance at all, but rather the idealized nuclear family. (92)