For many of us, romance is an escape from our day to day lives where we can just focus on the witty repartee, brooding good looks, and all of the tingles in the groiny bits.

This month, Nikki and Meg are sharing a book they somehow love yet it contains their most hated trope(s).

Nowhere on Meg’s TBR list would we expect to see a grumpyXsunshine western single dad romance with a nanny AND A SURPRISE BABY.

But surprise, it’s time for Meg’s pick, Heartless by Elsie Silver.

In this episode we chat about:

• how a GRUMPY single dad turns out to be the most emotionally mature character of all time
• panty-dropping meet cute moments in weirdly named coffeeshops
• a nanny who is neither Julie Andrews as a nun nor “not like other girls”, but just awesome, really
• hot, hot, hot tub moments

Read our full written Heartless book review

Get the full show notes at https://www.firstdatesandsoulmates.com/episodes/elsie-silver-heartless

From the book (read aloud by Nikki), on Cade's internal monologue:

From the book (read aloud by Nikki), Cade and Willa's fear/commitment exchange:

Nikki, on Cade as a character:

Meg, on why the central relationship works:

Books & Media We Mention:

* The Chestnut Springs series by Elsie Silver (the rest of this series)

* Fool Hearts (Plum Valley Cowboys Book 1) by Emmy Sanders

* How to Say I Do by Tal Bauer

* To the Moon & Back by NR Walker

* The Nannies of New York series by K. Sterling

* Descript software for transcription, podcast editing & Reel creation

* Money Honeys Podcast with Freddie, Chantel, and Dev

Nikki's got a cool work opportunity that means she's stepping away from recording for a bit — so we're taking a short hiatus and re-releasing some of our favorite episodes in the meantime (all labeled, so you know what's a rerun).

While we're off, I'll be writing Elijah's book, spending time with family, and doing some behind-the-scenes upgrades — including moving fully off Substack. If you followed us there, make sure you're subscribed on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss anything.

All our show notes, frameworks, and book recs now live at firstdatesandsoulmates.com.

We're also close to a big YouTube milestone — if you've got a second, hit subscribe at Youtube.com/@FirstDatesSoulmates. It genuinely helps, even if you mostly listen elsewhere.

Miss us already? Check out:

🎙️ Would Recommend — Nikki's podcast on customer experience

🎙️ Aggressively Human — Meg's podcast on keeping business human in the age of AI

👯 Nikki as a guest on Meg's podcast talking customer service in the age of AI

See you in the fall. 💛

This week Nikki and Meg are joined by Megan Eckman, author of PDX Spellbound, to talk about the genre that promises exactly one thing: it's gonna be okay.

Cozy romance isn't about the absence of conflict — it's about the absence of catastrophe. No mafia basements. No miscommunication tropes. No throwing your therapist for a loop. Just adults, having adult conversations, in a world where the worst thing that happens is a bakery running out of cinnamon rolls.

Listen in for:

• What actually defines cozy romance — and why it's not the same thing as low heat or closed door
• The real difference between cozy and slow burn (hint: it's pace, not tension)
• Why "healing" might be the most important word in this entire genre — for the characters and for the reader
• A deep dive into cozy fantasy: Sabrina the Teenage Witch, That's So Raven, and Howl's Moving Castle as the blueprint
• Whether cozy romance can exist in a big city (yes — otaku office workers and a cat café in Montreal say hello)
• A very funny detour into K-dramas, J-dramas, and the six-episode hand-hold
• Megan's real-life "I love you" letter and the mailbox panic attack that followed

The Framework, In Short: cozy romance is defined less by what's absent (violence, high stakes, explicit heat) and more by what's present — hope, kindness, and communities that catch people instead of testing them. The pace is slow, but that's not the same as slow burn: slow burn runs on simmering tension that eventually ignites, while cozy runs on the absence of tension doing the narrative work instead. And underneath the cinnamon buns and magic coffee cups, the genre's real throughline is healing — not just for the characters, but for the reader borrowing a couple hours inside a fundamentally safe world.

https://firstdatesandsoulmates.com/episode/cozy-romance/

Pull Quotes:

Books & Media We Mention:

• Love is Hard for Otaku
• Agnes Obel's Mystical Cat Shelter
• Lore Olympus
• Howl's Moving Castle (book and film)
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch (the Melissa Joan Hart one)
• That's So Raven
• An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder by K. Valentine
• Assistant to the Villain
• The Duchess War by Courtney Milan (Meg's ship)
• Dynamite Kiss (Megan's ship)
• Game Changer, Season 8 (Dropout) (Nikki's ship)
• Keith Plays a Porn Game in Heaven (Try TV) (Nikki's ship)

About Our Guest

Megan Eckman (she/her) grew up on fantasy books, 90s rom-coms, and BBC sitcoms in equal measure. She's been writing silly, magical stories since college. PDX Spellbound, her monthly rom-com series, is her love letter to Portland's weird, wonderful energy. She lives in Vancouver, WA — just across the river from Portland — with her husband and one very opinionated tricolor cat (the inspiration for her very opinionated magical cats).

Get a free month of PDX Spellbound: https://pdxspellbound.com/

Somewhere between You’ve Got Mail and a phone plan you forgot to cancel, a whole subgenre of rom-coms decided that the sexiest thing you can do is fall for someone’s grief-texts before you know their face, their name, or the fact that you have no business reading their voicemails.

Nikki and Meg dig into Voicemails for Isabelle and its 2023 cousin Love Again — two films built on the same bones: someone’s dead loved one’s number gets reassigned, a total stranger becomes an accidental witness to someone else’s rawest, most unguarded grief, and instead of doing the normal human thing (saying “wrong number, so sorry for your loss”), they just... keep listening.

Nikki and Meg discuss:

• The “anti-dating app” premise — no photo, no bio, no strategically fished fish pic, just someone’s unfiltered interior life, and why that’s simultaneously the most romantic and most deeply unhinged foundation a relationship can be built on
• Why staying silent is the real betrayal here — not the wrong number, not the listening, but the choosing not to say anything while your crush becomes increasingly based on surveillance
• The redemption math: what actually has to happen for “I’ve been secretly listening to your dead sister’s voicemails for weeks” to be forgivable, and why both movies kind of chicken out on making their heroes grovel enough for it
• Sister acts, San Francisco food trucks, and why Wes might be the blandest man to ever accidentally fall in love with someone’s grief
• A grand unified theory of the wrong-number romance, tracing the DNA back through You’ve Got Mail, P.S. I Love You, and a stack of “we’ve been texting and I don’t know it’s actually you” books

If you’ve ever wanted to yell “just tell her!” at your television, this is the episode for you.

Films

• Voicemails for Isabelle (Netflix) — Zoey Deutch, Nick Robinson
• Love Again (2023) — Priyanka Chopra, Sam Heughan; remake of a German film based on a novel by Sophie Kramer
• Set It Up — Zoey Deutch, Glen Powell (referenced as an earlier FDSM episode)
• You’ve Got Mail
• P.S. I Love You
• Practical Magic (+ upcoming Practical Magic 2)

Books

• Top Secret by Sarina Bowen & Elle Kennedy
• Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade
• Queer Ways to Fall in Love series by Jax Caldner
• P.S. I Hate You by Lauren Connelly

This week’s ships:

• Top Secret by Sarina Bowen & Elle Kennedy
• Mac’s Horribly Hellacious Ghost Town by AJ Sherwood (final book in the Mac’s Marvelous Manifestation series)
• First book in series: Brandon’s Very Merry Haunted Christmas
• Full series reading order

The Grump isn’t just the villain and the Sunshine isn’t just a naive ingenue.

It only took 115 episodes to get here, but Meg and Nikki are finally doing a full deep-dive on grumpy x sunshine — one of the most popular character dynamics in romance, and one with more actual structure to it than "opposites attract." What makes a grump different from just an asshole? What stops a sunshine character from reading as a doormat? And why does this specific pairing show up in AO3 tags, Christmas novellas, and workplace romance in equal measure? We get into all of it — plus a real answer to whether queer grumpy x sunshine escapes the genre's usual body-type stereotypes (spoiler: not as much as it should).

Want the full structural breakdown? Read the Grumpy/Sunshine Framework.

Listen in for:

• Why “opposites attract” is too broad a label, and what actually separates grumpy sunshine from its cousins in the family tree (black cat/golden retriever gets its own dissection)
• The hard line between grumpy and cruel, and why a grump who punishes people for existing isn’t playing this trope anymore
• Fandom’s fingerprints all over this one, from Geralt and Jaskier to Bones and Kirk to a Zootopia fic (?) Nikki wishes she’d never gone looking for
• How the dynamic shifts (or stubbornly doesn’t) when the pairing goes queer, and the body-type stereotypes still doing a lot of quiet work underneath it

Nikki, on the difference between a grump and just an asshole [11:07]:

Meg, on the sunshine character's real boundary [15:08]:

Nikki, on what the resolution actually requires [38:19]:

Nikki, on whether queer grumpy x sunshine escapes gendered stereotyping [40:55]:

Books & Media Mentioned:

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

It Happened One Summer

A Deal with the Devil by Elizabeth Rourke

The Geek Who Saved Christmas by Annabeth Albert

Fae Quinn’s Christmas Daddy series

Peppermint Bark No Bite by Bailey Seaborn

What we’re shipping:

The Governess Affair by Courtney Milan (start of the Brothers Sinister series)

Magpie by Lucy Lennox

The 1970s gave us Star Wars, Watergate, the sexual revolution, and what critics apparently decided to call romantic comedies.

Nikki and Meg are back with the next chapter of Rom-Coms Through the Ages, and this week’s entries are Grease (1978) and Annie Hall (1977).

Nikki and Meg discuss:

* Why Grease is ‘50s nostalgia dipped in ‘70s cynicism and how the candy colours and hand jive are doing a lot of heavy lifting over some genuinely dark material lurking underneath

* The Woody Allen of it all: how Annie Hall uses genuinely innovative filmmaking techniques (fourth-wall breaks, non-linear narrative, walk-and-talks) to dress up a script that is, and we quote, “a complete self-indulgent, navel-gazing piece of shit”

* The Pygmalion problem that connects Grease, Annie Hall, and My Fair Lady and why all three films named after women are actually about what men want those women to become

* Why Rizzo is the character Meg wanted to be at 14 and the character she actually is at 40-something (and why Sandy’s whole arc hits differently in retrospect)

If you’ve ever wondered why your favourite ‘90s rom-com feels so warm and alive by comparison, this episode is the origin story.

Books We Mention:

* Shadows Never Lie & Shadows Never Leave by Lark Taylor

* The Prince and the Player (The Prince Pact, Book 1) by Nora Phoenix

How You Can Support The Show

Share the show with a friend or loved one!

Rate, review, and subscribe on your podcast provider of choice

Discover your romance trope and get a custom play list at https://firstdatesandsoulmates.com/quiz/

Follow Us On Social:

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/firstdatesandsoulmates/

TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@firstdatesandsoulmates

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstDatesSoulmates

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@firstdatesandsoulmates

Email us at [email protected]

Share the show with a friend or loved one!

Got a Little Extra Money to Spend?

Check out our sponsorship opportunities: https://firstdatesandsoulmates.com/sponsor/

Buy our official merch on TeePublic: http://tee.pub/lic/6TtnpmFagAk

Get Meg’s Latest Book: https://amzn.to/4altuTv

Shop our affiliate book recs on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/shop/caseboltcreative

If you’re into your 100th reheat of Heated Rivalry and you’re looking for your next favourite, Nikki and Meg have you.

This week they’re breaking down what actually makes the Game Changers series work and the emotional formula underneath the fandom.

What they get into:

* The “soft, squishy boy hiding behind a stoic fuckboy facade” formula and where else you’ll find it in the wild

* Secret relationship pressure cookers from competing NHL teams to the president’s Secret Service detail (yes, really)

* The rivals-not-enemies dynamic that hits differently than enemies to lovers

* The long-distance logistics that make every reunion explosive

The formula is rivals plus yearning plus impossible logistics plus one person who has no idea how to say the thing out loud. Meg and Nikki have a reading list for every single piece of it.

Books We Recommend:

Game Changers series (Heated Rivalry) by Rachel Reid

Him / Us by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy

Puckboys series by Eden Finley and Saxon James

Zero Hour series by Amy Nicole Walker

Love Logic series by K.M. Neuhold

Bedside Manner series by C.G. Macington

Dear Plant Daddy by Shenee Howard

The Worst Best Man by Kate Canterbury

Diving in Deep by K.A. Mitchell

Gravity by Tal Bauer

Secret Service by Tal Bauer

Saddles to Sunup by Emmy Sanders

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

PS I hate you by Lauren Connelly

Mistakes were made by Meryl Pilsner

Rookie Move by Sarina Bowen

How You Can Support The Show

Share the show with a friend or loved one!

Rate, review, and subscribe on your podcast provider of choice

Discover your romance trope and get a custom play list at https://firstdatesandsoulmates.com/quiz/

Follow Us On Social:

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/firstdatesandsoulmates/

TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@firstdatesandsoulmates

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstDatesSoulmates

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@firstdatesandsoulmates

Email us at [email protected]

Share the show with a friend or loved one!

Got a Little Extra Money to Spend?

Check out our sponsorship opportunities: https://firstdatesandsoulmates.com/sponsor/

Buy our official merch on TeePublic: http://tee.pub/lic/6TtnpmFagAk

Get Meg’s Latest Book: https://amzn.to/4altuTv

Shop our affiliate book recs on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/shop/caseboltcreative

Get a paid subscription on Substack for one month or for many months!

Get full access to First Dates & Soulmates: Romance Podcast at firstdatesandsoulmates.substack.com/subscribe

Pride Month isn’t over yet, and Nikki and Meg are closing it out with the corner of the rainbow nobody’s putting on a deep dive: asexual romance. The A doesn’t stand for ally, y’all; it stands for a whole spectrum of stories where the spice dial gets turned down and the intimacy dial gets cranked all the way up.

Listen in for:

* What actually fills the space in a romance when sex isn’t the payoff, and why the genre’s deep interiority makes ace stories hit so hard

* The “problem to be solved” trope they’re both done with, and what separates a great ace romance from a lazy one

* Why ace and aspec characters stay nearly invisible in mainstream media, and what that did to a whole generation figuring themselves out

* Nikki gets real about identifying as ace, dating in a small town, and why these books feel like a promise that it’s possible

The queer love continues on this show forever and ever; Pride Month just gave it a spotlight. Press play, then come tell them how you read romance.

Our Ace/Aspec Recommendations:

* Upside Down by NR Walker

* His Quiet Agent by Ada Maria Soto

* Oceans That Swim by Casey Cox

* Inevitable by Briar Prescott

* Unconventional Hearts by Emmy Sanders

* Squared Away by Annabeth Albert

* Cupid Calling by Viano Oniomoh

* The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun

* Something Fabulous by Alexis Hall

* Something Extraordinary by Alexis Hall

* Finding You by E.M. Lindsey

* Here We Go Again by Alison Cochrun

* Role Playing by Cathy Yardley

* That Kind Of Guy by Talia Hibbert

* The Mistletoe Motive by Chloe Liese

* Our Bloody Pearl by D. N. Bryn

* The Cybernetic Tea Shop by Meredith Katz

* Set the Record Straight by Hannah Bonam-Young

Other Mentions:

Sex Lives of Superheroes by Diana McCallum

The Greening of Thaddeus Grey by Jay Hogan

It’s Pride Month, and Nikki and Meg are spending it with a lesbian fight club and a bunch of gays on vacation.

This week’s episode is a double feature: Bottoms (2023) and Fire Island (2022), two queer comedies with 98% and 94% on Rotten Tomatoes respectively that somehow flew under the radar until now.

Both films skip the coming-out arc entirely. Both are messy, funny, and a little absurd. And both have something genuinely sharp to say about class, hierarchy, and what queer stories are actually allowed to be.

Nikki and Meg dig into:

* Why starting with “we’re already gay” changes everything about how these films work, and what it means that queer identity isn’t the transformation arc

* How both films use social hierarchy (popular cheerleaders, wealthy gay lawyers, and Nicholas Galitzine acting like a “whiny, whiny bitch” on crutches) to ask the same question Pride and Prejudice was asking in Regency England

* The Bottoms subversion: what happens when you take Fight Club, swap in lesbians, and accidentally build a feminist empowerment movement you didn’t mean to start

* Fire Island as a queer Pride and Prejudice retelling that earns its happy-for-now ending precisely because it refuses the heteronormative template for what a romantic ending has to look like

Books & Media We Mention:

Bottoms (2023), dir. Emma Seligman, written by Rachel Sennott and Emma Seligman

Fire Island (2022), dir. Andrew Ahn, written by Joel Kim Booster

Would Recommend: Real Stories From Businesses Worth Talking About, hosted by Nikki McKnight https://theopshop.biz/wouldrecommend

What' We’re Shipping This Week:

* When You Least Expect It by Haley Cass

* The Beast Who Bought Me by Leighton Green, Clemenza Family Series Book 1

How You Can Support The Show

Share the show with a friend or loved one!

Rate, review, and subscribe on your podcast provider of choice

Discover your romance trope and get a custom play list at https://firstdatesandsoulmates.com/quiz/

Follow Us On Social:

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/firstdatesandsoulmates/

TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@firstdatesandsoulmates

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstDatesSoulmates

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@firstdatesandsoulmates

Email us at [email protected]

Share the show with a friend or loved one!

Got a Little Extra Money to Spend?

Check out our sponsorship opportunities: https://firstdatesandsoulmates.com/sponsor/

Buy our official merch on TeePublic: http://tee.pub/lic/6TtnpmFagAk

Get Meg’s Latest Book: https://amzn.to/4altuTv

Shop our affiliate book recs on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/shop/caseboltcreative

Get a paid subscription on Substack for one month or for many months!

Get full access to First Dates & Soulmates: Romance Podcast at firstdatesandsoulmates.substack.com/subscribe

Queer historical romance isn’t a revision of history; it’s a restoration of it. Meg and Nikki sit down with queer historical romance author Joanna Lowell to talk about what it actually takes to write trans and queer characters into the Victorian era with both rigour and heart .

Meg and Nikki dig in with Joanna on:

* Why Joanna set A Shore Thing in the 1880s specifically and what that decade was doing to the very concept of sexual identity

* Joanna on the Courtney Milan principle: not historically ordinary, historically extraordinary

* Meg’s hot take on queer romance series where every single character is queer, and yes, she went there

* How Joanna writes pronouns for a non-binary Regency character when the language literally didn’t exist yet

Learn more about Joanna at https://www.joannalowell.com/

Joanna's books we discussed:

* The Duke Undone, Joanna’s debut novel

* A Shore Thing, the story of a Victorian botanist & transmasc artist/bike shop owner

* A Rare Find, a standalone Regency sapphic romance

* What we're shipping this week:

* When Twilight Breaks by Sarah Sundin

* Shadows Never Lie (Shadow Duet, Book 1) by Lark Taylor

* Earthly Playing Field by Radhika Singh

* nvidiosa - Argentinian TV series by Carolina Aguirre

* Matias Half-Keyboard (accessibility tool mentioned by Joanna)

This episode is brought to you by Happily Ever Indie, the romance marketing education nobody else is teaching—how readers actually find books on Amazon, what makes the platform decide to show yours, and why so much common advice doesn’t lead to sales.