Episode 101 kicks off with a deceptively simple question that nearly broke Threads: does romance require a happily ever after?Nikki and Meg are firmly in the yes camp. HEA or HFN required, or else it’s a love story and it belongs on a different shelf. But the more interesting conversation is about what “happy” actually means now versus what it meant when the Romance Writers of America first put the definition on paper in the 1980s. Spoiler: it has never stopped evolving, and that evolution is doing a lot of fascinating work.They also get into the shelving problem, why mislabelling love stories as romance isn’t just annoying, it’s a trust issue, and close on Nikki’s spicy provocation: is the push to strip the HEA from romance just literary elitism in a trench coat? Meg has a response. It involves Henry Higgins and yelling about 'My Fair Lady.’

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