The End of Romance

by Lily Meyer

A big-hearted, wise, unceasingly buoyant novel about a woman who, after escaping a bruising marriage, theorizes that happiness is possible solely with the eradication of all romance--only to find a love that could change her life forever

Sylvie Broder was taught early to embrace joy. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who'd developed a system of thought that focused on enjoying the life they'd snatched back from Hitler, Sylvie grew up believing in the tenacious pursuit of pleasure. So, when she finds herself trapped in a suffocating, emotionally abusive marriage, no one is more unmoored than Sylvie herself. With enormous fortitude, Sylvie frees herself and turns to graduate school, determined to prove her new Straight women will find true liberation and happiness only once romance is eradicated.

Sylvie uses her new-found freedom to enjoy men, but never to commit to one, priding herself in separating sex from tenderness. She doesn't sleep over, certainly doesn't cuddle, and never hooks up with a man more than once. Then she meets Robbie and Abie...and finds her philosophy sorely tested. A warm and gentle man, Robbie treats Sylvie with patience and enormous kindness, offering her the soft place to land she hasn't had since childhood. Abie, on the other hand, is passionate and dynamic, a man who challenges Sylvie, and with whom she finds herself constantly disarmed. With both men, she feels a deep desire that looks, worryingly, a lot like love.

Cleverly constructed, delightfully funny, and beautifully written, The End of Romance is an anti-romance romance novel that charts its fallible heroine's tumultuous journey to love and happiness with erudition and deep feeling—a story for anyone who, despite their very best efforts, has fallen in love, and wondered why.

Genres: Romance, Fiction, Contemporary

336 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication February 3, 2026

Reviews

[Jillane · Rating 4 out of 5]

there’s something about this that touched me; i loved the philosophical aspect, sylvie’s attempts to figure out how to live and what it means to be alive and how to share that life with other people.

thank you to netgalley and the publishers for the e-arc!

[laurakellylitfit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Out February 3rd, 2026

Sylvie’s story kicks off with a gut-punch: she’s stuck in a toxic marriage that’s slowly draining her spirit, despite being raised to chase joy like it’s oxygen. Her family history—rooted in survival and celebration—makes her situation feel even more heartbreaking. But she doesn’t stay down for long. With grit and a sharp mind, she breaks free and dives into grad school, where she hatches a bold theory: straight women can only be truly happy if they ditch romance altogether. It’s radical, it’s messy, and it’s her way of reclaiming control.

She throws herself into this new philosophy with full force—hookups without strings, no cuddling, no repeats. It’s all about separating pleasure from emotional vulnerability. But then Robbie and Abie show up, and everything starts to unravel. Robbie’s gentle and grounding, while Abie’s fiery and unpredictable. Both men challenge her beliefs in different ways, and Sylvie finds herself caught between what she’s sworn off and what her heart might actually want. The tension between her ideals and her feelings makes for a compelling, often funny, and deeply human ride.

What makes this story stand out is how it balances sharp wit with emotional depth. Sylvie isn’t just trying to avoid heartbreak—she’s trying to rewrite the rules of love itself. But as she stumbles through desire, connection, and vulnerability, it becomes clear that even the most carefully constructed theories can’t protect us from the chaos of feeling. It’s a messy, thoughtful, and surprisingly tender journey that reminds us how love—whether we want it or not—has a way of sneaking in through the cracks.

Thank you to NetGalley and Viking for this ARC!

[Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about a woman who, after extricating herself from an abusive relationship, turns to philosophy to intellectualize her relationship, in the hopes of rationalizing it. I found the constant philosophizing and intellectualizing a little draining!

[Meghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this book in three days. I found Sylvie’s story heartbreaking, frustrating, and also so relatable. One aspect I really enjoyed is that Sylvie felt very real to me, which led to me feeling so strongly about some of the decisions she makes. This narrative is VIVID and I encourage others to be enveloped by this thought provoking story.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew that when The End of Romance opened with Sylvie throwing a massive temper tantrum as a child because her parents wouldn’t let her go to a sleepover that she and I were going to have a long, bumpy road ahead.

I wasn’t wrong. Books that revolve around a character’s personality and how it forms their world view tend to be books you either really enjoy or really don’t care for, depending on how your own personality aligns with that of the narrator.

Sylvie drove me crazy. She’s raised by a combination of parents who don’t want her to express her feelings at all and her grandparents, who put so much focus on letting her express herself that she neglects to take into consideration how her actions and emotions could affect others.

Having never directly experienced a balanced relationship with expressing emotions and love, Sylvie gets into a relationship based on physical attraction as a teenager after the death of her grandparents. At first this fulfills a need for her but she becomes so dependent on the relationship that she loses the friends she has, struggles to make new ones, and becomes more entwined in a relationship that’s becoming increasingly toxic.

She finally breaks free by relying on her philosophical studies and on the advice of an imaginary turtle in her head (nope, not kidding). Predictably she decides that romance needs to end not just for her (though one could argue that she’s never actually experienced it so has no actual concept of what it is) but for everyone.

Not surprisingly she ends up falling for someone who’s the complete opposite of her husband. This offers her many things she was deprived of, but leaves her with latent issues that periodically rear their ugly heads when Robbie is so agreeable in an attempt to try and make her happy, but she has trained herself to be fulfilled with something different. During this time she finally forms a lasting friendship, but Nadia’s own life changes and Sylvie falling for Abie while still being with Robbie threaten to upend her relationships again.

I find Sylvie exhausting and annoying. She forms such strong stances on things that are based on very little personal experience. She holds people to unbearably high standards and then gets angry at them for not meeting or sustaining them, although from their perspective, understanding what those given standards are at any particular moment has to be almost impossible, since they seem to change based on the mood Sylvie is in or what’s going on in the world that day. Plus I really, REALLY hated the imaginary turtle, though if she had listened to some of its really practical advice that she didn’t want to hear, I might have found a way to like her just a teensy bit more.

I found myself actually feeling mad on behalf of the two different men she fell for after leaving her husband Jonah, because I felt they deserved better than her, even if I do feel that Robbie is too agreeable and passive. It feels mean to think Sylvie is undeserving of a good man, but I’m not sure she’s a point in her emotional development that she’s a good person for someone to be in a relationship with. She keeps expecting people to bend and keep up with her ever changing expectations without reciprocating any understanding or generosity. She seems to use being controlled by Jonah as a justification for always having things the way she wants them in her relationships.

I think this could be a great book club book because there’s so much to unpack and discuss. Sylvie spends her adult life living in philosophy, but functioning through her emotions, getting frustrated when her life no longer matches philosophical ideologies she held as truths, and not really seeming to understand that your truths and beliefs change with you over time and are not the same as the person next to you. Setting rigid expectations not only sets you up for failure, but means you’ll inevitably end up disappointed with everyone else in your life too.

A complimentary copy of this book was provided by the publisher. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

[Firetruckmama · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an eARC of this book from NetGalley and the publisher, for which I thank them.

“The End of Romance” is by Lily Meyer. I cannot begin to explain what this book is about. I mean, on the surface it’s about a woman, Sylvie, who has two extremely proper parents (think stifling creativity and emotions), which is difficult for Sylvie (as a child) to deal with. She marries a man and, again, feels stifled and emotionally abused (she can do practically nothing correct). She leaves her husband and decides to go to graduate school, where she decides to work on a thesis. She meets a new best friend and ends up deciding to enjoy men, but never be tied down to one again. Eventually she meets Robbie, a lawyer, who is warm, gentle, and respects her. Then she meets Abie, a man who is passionate and challenges her. She realizes that, in their own ways, she loves them. All good but that summary really misses a lot of the book - first, the chapter are amazingly long (nearly 10% of the book was taken by just one chapter). There are a lot of philosopher names thrown in - Chekov, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard - which makes sense as Sylvie is using her philosophy degree, but for someone who may not be familiar with those names, it was a lot of online research. Additionally, Sylvie does long internal monologues - and they’re not always the most interesting to read as she’s intellectualizes her decisions that felt laborious to read after a while. I honestly cannot say that I really liked any of the characters - Robbie and Abie on the surface seemed to be so overly nice that I kept hoping for some depth to counter the flatness they sometimes had on the page. The best friend should’ve had more depth than she did - and I kept hoping she would, but even she never quite got there. I cannot say that this was a bad book, but it felt overly long and, honestly, I was a lot tired of the political discussions (I want to say the modern part of the book happened in 2019, but I think I’m incorrect about that). I’d honestly recommend that anyone interested in this book read some other online reviews - there are some who have loved it and some who didn’t - and a number who, like me, felt it was “okay.” It wasn’t the book for me, but it could be for you.

[Mal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Viking Penguin for the advanced reader copy

When Sylvie's grandparents die, she's left bereft. They were the only ones who loved her in a way that was explicit and joyous. Her parents are cold and stiff and afraid of emotion. So when Sylvie starts dating Jonah, in high school, she makes him her world even though everyone else can see that Jonah is emotionally abusive. It isn't until after they've graduated from college and been married for almost two years that Sylvie gets up the courage to leave. She runs away, staying with a friend until she returns to school, getting first a masters and then a PhD in philosophy. It is her time in her PhD program when she comes to clear conclusions about how there should be no more romance and that she should be able to keep her emotions separate from sex and love. Falling in love, first with Robbie and then Abie, makes her question her theory (and the basis for her dissertation). In the end, she must decide whether love is worth risking everything she thought she knew.

This novel was all at once frustrating, confusing, and deeply moving. Sylvie is a character who made me want to tear my hair out at times (or reach through the pages to yell at her) with how passive she was in parts of her life and with her assertions about the separation of romance and sex. But she also made me have such deep empathy for the feeling of being lost and not yet knowing who you are or how you matter in the world. I also felt frustrated with both Robbie and Abie, as characters. At times they felt like signposts for "here is how Sylvie will overcome this aspect of her trauma" rather than like fleshed out characters. They were both too nice in ways that felt inauthentic, but in the end they were also sympathetic characters. I'm sure this is a book that will keep me chewing on its ideas for a while, though whether I can say I enjoyed it seems beyond the point.

The End of Romance is out February 3, 2026

[Helen Wu ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25

I took my time reading The End of Romance. I was curious about how the Sylvie escaped her abused marriage and how she then navigated a love triangle. The premise is very interesting. She is an academic, so many of her decisions are woven into philosophical discussions. That part fascinates me because I am in my doctoral years right now, so I can relate to her academic lens. At the same time, I don’t fully get her philosophical talk. I find that she uses a lot of her so-called philosophy to justify her actions. I don’t fully understand that.

I wish she described details about her marriage. She mentions emotional abuse here and there, but I wanted a deeper dive into how that led to her decision to leave. The part about the two new guys is compelling. You will fall in love with them because they are both great men. But I still want to understand her actions and why she makes certain decisions or covers certain truths. Perhaps I shouldn’t judge her because I am not in her shoes. Still, the author tells the story in a way that keeps me intrigued. I kept wanting to understand why she thinks this way and why she moves through the world in this particular pattern.

Her female friendship with Nadia is one of the strongest parts. I am also fascinated in seeing how higher education and the power dynamics between faculty and students can become abusive too. That was described well. The tension with parental expectations also felt real. So overall, this was a fascinating read. I don’t fully get her. I don’t fully get it. But maybe that’s the point. And I think you would enjoy the book.

Thank you NetGalley and Viking Penguin for the ARC!

[Young · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sylvie is a character I hope to never have the pleasure of meeting in life.
This book is messy, frustrating, dense and attempting to be philosophical but ends up being confused. Essentially the story follows a woman, who was abused and traumatized by her husband, trying to prove that a woman’s true liberation is when romance is eradicated but ends failing spectacularly to prove her philosophy.
It’s essentially a book about rediscovery and healing after a very traumatic experience, and I think it would’ve loved the book is Sylvie wasn’t so messy and selfish. She is a character who wants everything without any consideration for the people around her. And maybe I should feel more sympathy towards her because of what she went through, but it is literally stated in the book that that is who she is, a messy person who can’t figure out what they want, or as it was written “afraid of what she wants”. It was pretty evident in the beginning with how passive she was growing up. A passive person who has big opinions who is too dependent on other people to regulate her emotions.
And I think the book is aware of that because it does have moments where it tries to call her out, and it’s pretty realistic to how messy and unforgiving life and relationships can be.
So because of that it’s not a bad book, but because of the philosophical talk, which made the reading experience a little dull and dense, and the insufferable main character I really did not enjoy reading this book.

This arc was won in a goodreads giveaway

[Rebecca Onion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely desperate for someone I know to read this and discuss it with me!

This is a romance novel! Sort of! Our female main character is Sylvie, who was in a terrible, abusive relationship throughout HS, during college, and in a brief, awful marriage right out of school. She breaks free and becomes a philosopher; most of the book takes place in a grad program at UVA, where Sylvie is writing a dissertation on the following topic: Is it possible to be a straight woman who lusts after and dates men, while also arranging your life so that you don't have to participate in all the negative things that heterosexual romance can bring into women's lives?

But meanwhile - while taking classes, teaching undergrads, studying for oral exams - this grad student meets men. Multiple men. And kind of falls in love with them!

Low points of this book, for me: The sometimes strained way the philosophical underpinnings of Sylvie's emotional/romantic choices get tied to her work in the academy. I guess it would have been hard to execute this novel without writing a protagonist who is thinking about these ideas for her job. But with this protagonist who has this job, I sometimes felt like the academic parts lapsed into a bit of a lit review.

High points are the friendships and relationships Sylvie has, which Meyer describes so well. And the sex scenes are excellent! Both the good sex and the bad sex...

[Anne Wolfe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps my lack of knowledge about philosophy (I was an English Major) is responsible for my reaction to this novel. If so, please feel free to ignore my opinion. I had a complete lack of understanding of Sylvie's theories about victimhood, abuse and even privacy. So much of this novel depends on understanding Sylvie's choice of PhD topic is related to her own experience, which is based on her history with her first boyfriend who becomes her husband. I also found it hard to relate to her two subsequent serious relationships, one to passive Robbie and the other to bear-like (big and furry) Abie. There is also the theme of female friendship, with whom Sylvie keeps failing to keep in touch.

Another personal peeve is the naming and description of every food planted, cooked and consumed, but named without further description. Although Meyer writes well, I found the sex scenes quite unrealistic. Also unrealistic were her imaginary friends, continuing into adulthood. Really? And how about joyful, hedonistic Holocaust survivor grandparents? I don't think so.

Thanks to NetGalley and Viking for an ARC copy of this book. The opinions are my honest ones.

[Rudi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first sentence: “Sylvie Broder first tried to think herself out of love when she was nine.”

After a creepy and short first marriage, the hilarious, philosophic and, finally, wise young Sylvie specializes in thinking herself in and out of love – and of friendships, flings, worldviews and identities. Her hyperactive intellect takes her to graduate school in philosophy where she concocts her dissertation, a philosophy of modern relationships titled The End of Romance.
But as intellectually vigilant and rigorous as Sylvie wants to be, when she desperately needs a dose of truth and clarity, she turns to her imaginary friends, the pirate Captain Lightning and his unnamed turtle aide. This charming collision of rational and intuitive, brain versus heart (and flesh) is just one unreconcilable conflict in Sylvie’s coursework on love and life, a saga that makes for a gripping, funny, touching meta-romance story that is hard to put down and, in the end, uplifting.

The End of Romance invisibly weaves together several layers of argument and contemplation. On one level, it is a brilliantly observed comedy of Millennial manners. But Meyer also grapples with her Jewish identity as a secular female detached from what American Jews usually argue about. She weighs in on #MeToo, gender philosophy, mind-control predators and lots of sex politics (and practices), always with wit, never interfering with the novel’s momentum. It’s masterful and beautifully written.

Sylvie Broder is a woman with legs. Like Phillip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sylvie appear in future novels by Meyer, an ambitious and entertaining thinker and writer who is profoundly tuned in to these times.

[Larissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book. The End of Romance is a story about Sylvie and her journey to figuring out what is real love and what she wants with her life in connection with love. Sylvie’s love life is filled with ups and downs and after a horrible first experience with love Sylvie really wants to find a new way to deal with love. Making it something that doesn’t have to be a huge chunk of her life she can have sex without allowing love or relationships to relate to her personally. Her path to trying to live this ideal isn’t exactly straight forward and she finds many bumps along the way along with people who change how she looks at love. I think this is a beautiful story about self-discovery and shows the person you were today isn’t the person you will be later. You can also face the things that you’re scared about and change your philosophies.
Thank you to Viking Penguin and Netgalley for allowing me to read an advance copy of this title.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lovely book about Sylvie, her relationship with her parents and her crush on Jonah. It's my favorite kind of convoluted plot that had me guessing and often sighing with relief! It's really a heartfelt novel about society and women's place in it! So good!
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!

[Jaime · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wasn’t really my type of book, but I ended up enjoying it. Lots of philosophy written in a a relatable way. Sylvie has an abusive relationship and then creates all kinds of rules for herself going forward and has to figure out how she wants to live.

I received an early copy through Netgalley but all opinions are my own.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ugh. It started out decent and then I lost interest halfway through. It became too much whining about her life and poor me to keep me interested. I finished but I did not enjoy.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC

[Perri · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Started out strong and engaging but you end up really disliking the main character and it's quite redundant and drawn out for no reason.

[M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ir was a good read.

[Kait · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for the ARC of this book!

I enjoyed this story of love, healing, and life. This book had many interesting mentions of philosophy and relates it to specific situations that happen in our main characters life. I found that aspect of this story extremely interesting. However this book did drag on a bit long for me. It took awhile for me to get into the story, then around halfway through i lost interest, then it got more interesting towards the end again. Overall, I do think this was a story worth reading.