the reading list · love stories from where i stand
i’m asexual, and these are my favorite love stories
I’m asexual. I don’t experience sexual attraction. And my favorite genre is love stories.
I know that sounds like a contradiction. People always ask how I can love romance if I don’t feel the thing. The honest answer is simple: I read love stories the way a colour-blind person might love paintings. I notice different layers. The parts of a love story that aren’t about desire, about bodies, about heat, those parts come through sharper for me. Some books have so much going on underneath the wanting that they turn into a completely different story when you read them from where I’m standing.
These are the ones that got me. Not despite being ace. Because of it.
Here’s the lens I read with. Attraction was never one thing, it’s seven, and most love stories only ever chase one of them. Being ace made me notice the rest: the pull toward someone’s mind, the want to be close with no next step, the person who is more than a friend with no word for it. So when a book earns a place on this list, it’s almost always because it found one of those quieter attractions and built the whole thing on it, instead of defaulting to the one everyone else means when they say love. Under each book below, in the margin, is the one it’s built on, plus what I dug up on it after.
the video i’m asexual and these are my favorite love stories (yes, really) watch on youtube ↗ a few of these are amazon affiliate links, so if you buy through one, i earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. as an amazon associate i earn from qualifying purchases. nothing here is paid or sponsored, it’s just what’s actually on my shelf.
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Six of Crows
the most important love story i’ve ever read, and they barely touch.
I have to start here, because Kaz and Inej might be the most important romantic relationship I’ve ever read, and they barely touch. Kaz is a criminal mastermind who can’t be touched without his body going into a trauma response. Inej has her own complicated history with contact. And these two fall in love anyway. Deeply. Without the physical shortcut. Their love is built on trust, on respect, on watching each other be brilliant and choosing each other in the worst possible circumstances. There’s a moment in the second book, if you’ve read it you know the one, that wrecked me more than any kiss in any book ever has. Because it wasn’t about wanting. It was one person saying, I will meet you exactly where you are, even if where you are is hard. That is how I experience love. Exactly that.
built on attraction with the touch taken out
One honest thing, because it matters: Kaz isn’t an ace character. His aversion to touch is haphephobia, trauma, not orientation. As a boy he was mistaken for dead and left among plague bodies, and skin on skin throws him straight back there, which is why the gloves never come off. So this is a disability and trauma portrayal that touch-averse and ace readers happen to see themselves in, not representation of us. What makes it land is Inej’s terms: I would have you without armor, Kaz Brekker, or I would not have you at all. The glove scene in the second book, Crooked Kingdom, is him trying to.
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
a love the book refuses to name, because the unnamed thing is the truest thing.
This one asks the question I think about constantly: what do you call the most important relationship of your life when it isn’t romantic? Or is it romantic? Or does it even matter what you call it? Sam and Sadie make video games together across decades, and their bond is the whole emotional center of the book, and Zevin never once defines it. She lets it live in the space between friendship and romance and something that doesn’t have a word yet. Reading it as an ace person, I kept thinking, this is what my deepest connections actually feel like. Not quite friendship, not quite romance, more specific and more real than either box allows. The fact that she trusts you not to need it named is exactly why it works.
built on the bond there’s no word for
The title is Macbeth, the tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech, and the book quietly turns that despair into something closer to a respawn: another life, another try. And it isn’t only me reading Sam as ace. Zevin has said he feels intense but occasional romantic attraction and little to no sexual attraction, that the ace label fits as she understands it, while also being someone who would never reach for a label himself. So it’s author-confirmed coding, not a line on the page, which is its own kind of accurate.
a heads up loss and a sudden act of violence partway through.
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Words in Deep Blue
a whole love story told in letters left inside secondhand library books.
Two people who talk to each other through letters left inside secondhand library books. The whole love story unfolds in written words, chosen carefully and left for someone to find. For me, someone whose main experience of intimacy is language, the specific way a person puts their thoughts together, this book felt like home. The physical distance between the characters barely registers. What matters is: are you reading what I wrote? Did you understand what I meant? Are we building something in words that is more real than anything we could build by touch? It’s one of the most underrated love stories in YA, and I think it’s underrated precisely because the love is so quiet. It doesn’t perform. It just exists, in the margins, between the words.
built on intellectual intimacy, love as language
The thing they write in has a name: the Letter Library, a shelf at Howling Books whose titles aren’t for sale, where readers underline the lines that undo them and leave letters for strangers to find. Cath Crowley won the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for this. It’s also a grief novel, Rachel comes home having just lost her brother, so the quiet isn’t only romantic restraint. It’s someone learning how to speak again.
a heads up grief, and a sibling’s death by drowning.
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The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
seven husbands, and the point is that none of them are the love story.
Seven husbands, and the entire point is that none of them are the love story. The real one is the one she hides, the one that exists outside the performance. What got me is the line the book draws between performed love and actual love. Evelyn performs romance for the public, the marriages, the red carpets, the whole Hollywood spectacle, and none of it is real. The real thing is private, and unnamed for decades. As an ace person living in a world that performs romance constantly, that expects you to perform desire and attraction and coupledom on cue, Evelyn’s story hit somewhere specific. I know what it is to have the real thing be invisible. To have the love that actually matters be the one nobody sees.
built on performed romance vs the real thing
The book is unambiguous about it: Evelyn is bisexual, and says so in her own words, refusing to let either half cancel the other. The seven marriages are mostly strategy, studio-era cover and image control, which is the whole design. The public romance is the disguise, and the private one, with the actress Celia St. James, is the love. It came out in 2017 and became one of the most-read queer love stories of the decade, largely by word of mouth.
a heads up closeting-era homophobia, and an abusive marriage.
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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
being remembered is the love story. not attraction. recognition.
Addie is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Look away and you forget she existed. The whole book is about what it does to a person to be unknown, to connect with someone and have it erased on contact. And then she meets someone who remembers her. That moment, being known, being carried in someone’s memory, is the love story. Not attraction. Not desire. Recognition. I think about this book constantly, because as an ace person I sometimes feel invisible in conversations about love, like my version doesn’t register, like people look at my relationship and forget it counts. Addie’s story says: being remembered is the love story. I believe that completely.
built on recognition, being known
The rules of the curse are the cruelty. Addie can’t be remembered, but she also can’t leave a mark: she can’t say or write her own name, can’t be drawn or held in words, everything about her erases. Three hundred years of that, from 1714 on, until a boy in a New York bookshop says I remember you, and it turns out he has his own bargain with the same god. Schwab, who wrote it, is openly queer and has talked about her identity being real but not the loudest thing about her, which is a very ace-adjacent way to hold a self.
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A Little Life
not a romance. the most devastating love story i’ve ever read.
This is not a romance. It’s a book about friendship, and it’s the most devastating love story I’ve ever read. The love between Jude and Willem starts as friendship and becomes something that transcends every category. It’s care. It’s showing up. It’s witnessing someone’s worst moments and refusing to leave. The kind of love too busy holding a person together to bother with fireworks. I cried reading this in a way no traditional romance has ever made me cry, because this is the love I understand in my bones. It isn’t sexy. It isn’t exciting. It’s just there, every day, holding.
built on sustained presence, love as staying
It was shortlisted for the Booker and the National Book Award and won the Kirkus Prize, so the devastation is the earned, literary kind. But read this before you pick it up and take it seriously, because I mean it more here than anywhere else on the list. And one more honest thing: Jude’s distance from sex is trauma, not asexuality. I put this book here for the shape of the Jude and Willem love, the staying, not as ace representation. Those are two different things and it matters that we don’t collapse them.
a heads up sustained, graphic childhood sexual abuse, self-harm, and suicide. genuinely one of the heaviest books in print. go gently, or skip it.
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Loveless
the book i wish i’d had at fifteen. the love story is her friendships.
I had to end here, because Loveless is the book I wish I’d had at fifteen. Georgia gets to university expecting the big romance to finally happen, the kissing, the butterflies, the thing everyone else seems to feel effortlessly. And it doesn’t come. And she spirals, and wonders if she’s broken. And then she finds the word asexual. The love story of the book isn’t a romance at all. It’s Georgia falling in love with her friendships, realizing the deepest love of her life was there the whole time, just never the kind the movies told her to look for. I read it after I’d already figured myself out, and it still cracked something open. Seeing your exact spiral on a page, the confusion, the grief, then the relief of the word, that is a kind of recognition that feels like love itself.
built on the love that was in your friendships all along
This is the one where the representation is the text, not a reading between the lines. Georgia is aromantic and asexual, named on the page, and Alice Oseman, who wrote it and also made Heartstopper, is openly aro-ace herself. She’s said it isn’t autobiography but it draws on a lot of her own experience, and that she wanted an aro-ace coming-out story carried with the same weight we give every other one. It won the YA Book Prize in 2021. If you only read one book off this list, and you’re somewhere in the questioning, start here.