Think of your favorite romance novel, and don’t try to tell me that you don’t have one. It could be the one you proudly display on your shelf, like Pride and Prejudice, or Wuthering Heights, or it could be the one that you hide in the bottom drawer of your dresser and hope your roommate never sees, like Fifty Shades of Grey. I personally love a good romance novel; they’re probably my second favorite guilty pleasure, after nachos. But there’s something that Mr. Grey, Mr. Darcy, and Heathcliff won’t tell you, and that’s how to have a healthy relationship.

It goes without saying that romance novels paint unrealistic portraits of love; their protagonists tend to value passion and emotion over reason and decision making, instead of using the two as equals to navigate the challenges they face. Critics of romance novels often site anti-feminism as the culprit here, whether it’s specifically calling out an author for designing a weak female character or citing the societal conditioning that we all experience in regards to gender stereotypes. While these criticisms are often smart and well written, I don’t know if they capture all of the uphill battle that the genre faces.

There’s a theory as to why we as humans developed language, a theory as to why we tell and listen to stories. For our ancestors, it was advantageous; if one caveman could learn to avoid a poisonous plant from someone else, instead of stumbling upon the poison themselves, then that caveman’s (or cavewoman’s) life could potentially be extended. The stories evolved along with us, becoming more complicated as we advanced. Now, writers are specifically told to make their characters lives as exceptionally difficult as possible, because that is what will entertain the reader. We are supposed to make them suffer, physically and emotionally, in situations that are painful and miserable and embarrassing and awkward, because evolutionarily, it acts as a set of instructions to the reader, a potential course of action if we were ever to face that specific set of circumstances ourselves.

The romance genre values a passionate, emotional, slightly unstable or dependent female protagonist because, to put it simply, they get into the most trouble. They are the easiest to hurt. They are the ones who can’t walk away from the lover who always acts hot and cold. They are the ones who are unable to make a clean break when things go poorly. Love is the one of the most complicated parts of the human experience; as such, you’ll never read a romance novel with a character who’s reasonable AND rational AND always makes the best decisions in regards to her emotions, because quite frankly, her story is boring. It’s easy to navigate. And subconsciously, we crave complicated stories to save for situations that we can’t navigate on our own.

These complicated stories, however, with their emotional protagonists, create a paradox. For many people, when reading a romance novel, it’s hard not to confuse fact with fiction, to interpret the love that is written to the love that exists in the real world. It is in this way that romance novels might be damaging to our perception of relationships.

I think this is best exemplified by seventeen-year-old me. My favorite novel then (which is still one of my favorite novels now) is a book called Bad Romeo, by Australian diva Leisa Rayven. The book is incredibly well-written: it’s equal parts heart-wrenching and hysterical, and the emotions in the book are so strong you can feel them in the air around you. The book follows a young actress, Cassie, who falls in love with a jaded actor, Ethan, while in drama school. He breaks her heart, a few years later, the two are both cast as lovers in a Broadway show, forcing them to navigate their past and future.

Seventeen-year-old me loved this novel because Cassie’s struggle mirrored that of my own. At seventeen, I was in love with someone who was interested in, but did not love me. Someone who played with my emotions as often as Ethan did to Cassie. And because I did not know how to handle the situation, I took the course of action my favorite heroine did—I stayed involved, instead leaving when I should have.

Now, one terrible, emotionally-manipulative relationship later, I can re-read the book, and through my laughter and my tears, I can point out where Cassie went wrong, and where Ethan was a douchebag who didn’t deserve her. At seventeen, I relied on the book. I idealized the passionate, crazy love that we find in romance novels so much, that I believed that that’s what real love was. Unfortunately, real love, the love that couples the rational with the emotional, the good with the bad, the boring with the exciting, won’t often be written about. It’s up to us to understand that we’re only being shown something distorted. It’s up to us to realize that, as entertaining as they are, romance novels are still fiction.