That stretch between eighteen and the rest of your life — first apartment, first real job, the first heartbreak that actually rearranges you. New adult romance lives in that in-between, where the characters are old enough to make their own mistakes and young enough to make a lot of them. The feelings run high and unpolished, which is the whole appeal. For the grown-up version of the same emotional honesty, contemporary romance is the natural next step, and sports romance brings the campus-and-competition energy a lot of these stories live on.
