Several years ago, like thousands of others, I was blindsided by One Day. I also loved the bittersweet tale of love gone wrong in David Nicholls’s other novel Us where our protagonist’s marriage breakdown comes into focus on a trip through Europe, interspersed beautifully with scenes from when they fall in love.

I enjoyed how love blossomed from a marriage of convenience during the Windrush era in Andrea Levy’s Small Island. I loved the viewpoint of a man coming to terms with his homosexuality in A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale and the transgressive love affair of D.H. I enjoy love stories set in other cultures or those that could be written as forbidden.

The characters must have depth, genuine problems or some meaty psychological issues to get my teeth into. I also like it when characters are so real it’s painful like Sally Rooney’s awkward teenage fumbling in Ordinary People. I love stories that are based within a historical or time-slip setting like the Outlander series of novels by Diana Gabaldon. My favourite romcom is When Harry Met Sally so I do enjoy a ‘friends to lovers’ scenario, but it’s also witty with snappy dialogue and Billy Crystal making a woman miaow in bed. I like real obstacles: the terrible coincidence in Rosie Walsh’s The Man Who Didn’t Call the limits posed by Will’s attitude to his disability in Me Before You the mad wife in the attic in Jane Eyre the girlish mistake of refusing a proposal in Persuasion. Perhaps my problem isn’t with love, but with romance a much more contrived hearts, flowers and happy endings sort of place. I actively hate simple love stories with manufactured obstacles and I definitely hated Fifty Shades of Grey (which was in no way a love story, but marketed as one). I understand that, since Shakespeare, there’s been a set formula to the love story, but this can be taken to extremes. It’s just I don’t like it when love stories are packaged as romantic fiction or women’s fiction, given candy pink or baby blue covers, and characters who have little depth or motivation beyond the ‘meet cute’. I don’t object to a love story, in fact some of my favourite books are love stories. My objection is to categories and putting things in boxes.

However, I’m also that annoying person who writes outside the boxes on forms, resists the Census and ticks ‘rather not say’ if there’s an option to do so. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of romantic novels on the whole, not as a genre anyway.

One day nicholls