The popularity of series like Bridgerton and Heated Rivalry draws attention to an old feminist question: what is a feminist approach to romance? This reading group explores the genre as a transnational terrain which stretches earlier conceptions of the worlds of love crafted in popular romance. We explore the genre as a compensatory cultural form that mediates the contradictions of capitalism and the state, viewing romance as neither simply ideological nor resistant, but as an affective system that redistributes desire, security, and recognition under conditions of enduring inequality. From postwar mass-market romance novels to contemporary transnational romance in K-drama, C-drama, and global streaming cultures, this approach argues that romance rehearses what the state and capital withhold: emotional care, moral legibility, and the promise of social repair. Yet these compensations are uneven and politically contradictory, as the compensations of romance can appear to make the structural inequality of neoliberalism and rapacious globalization feel livable, or even desirable. By placing Anglophone romance scholarship in dialogue with feminist political economy and transnational media studies, the reading group envisions romance as a global genre that narrates, refracts and sometimes contests the violence of neoliberal capitalism and state erosion. This argument draws on classic scholarship on popular romance, affect and cultural studies by Radway, Modleski and Berlant and combines it with contemporary work on transnational romance literature, media and global streaming cultures. On these streaming cultures, Korean, Chinese and Japanese dramas offer interesting case studies. Uniquely among television ecosystems, screenwriting in the Korean television industry is overwhelmingly a women’s occupation. Arising out of a hyper-competitive education system, post-authoritarian political sphere and a pitiless work culture, Kdramas draw romance more explicitly into the realm of labor, precarity, demography and insecurity. A feminist engagement with transnational romance thus promises rich and fruitful deliberations on the meaning, contradictions and compensations of contemporary love worlds.