Since I am not what we would call an 'old soul', I figured it'd be a good idea to focus on modern romance (20's onward). It turns out that modern romance is more oriented towards love between humans and supernatural creatures. The first example that comes to my mind is 'Angel', a TV show that depicted the relationship between Angel--a 200-year-old vampire--and Cordelia Chase, a former high school cheerleader; despite the fact that Angel is a vampire, Cordelia quickly finds herself attracted to him, and together they live a relationship just as normal (with their ups and downs) as any regular love relationship between humans, and that's how romance is being created here.
In the same way, the twilight saga (film series) and MTV's new TV show 'Teen Wolf' respectively
illustrate the story of Bella Swan--a young and beautiful lady living in Forks, Washington--and Edward Culler, a 104-year-old vampire, and the story of Scott McCall-- a highschooler who recently turned into a werewolf--and his human girlfriend Allison Argent. Even though they might get killed at any given time, both Allison and Bella have absolutely no trouble falling in love with a werewolf and a vampire; they also learn how to love and accept those creatures just the way they are, and that's part of what make these stories romantic. Besides the concept of supernatural creatures being in love with humans, the other thing that makes these stories romantic is that Edward and Scott both have to permanently fight against their desire to devour their sweethearts, which also creates a lot of suspense.
On the other hand, the romance in the movie 'Avatar' by James Cameron works in a different kind of way: Here Jake Sully, the human character, turns his back on the human race and permanently becomes an avatar/Nav'vi so he can live happily ever after with his newly found love Neytiri, a wild, charming and lovely creature from Pandora (planet where the Na'vi and many other extraterrestrial tribes live).Modern romance definitely pictures romance as something unusual, extraordinary, exceptional: Bella, Cordelia and Allison all find love in super supernatural creatures' arms while Jake, a guy from the 'civilized world', abandons the human race and falls in love with a creature from the rural world. Modern romance also suggests that falling in love is all about following one's heart--rather than reason-since Bella, Cordelia and Allison have no logical reason to fall in love with those creatures; they actually put their lives at risk by doing so. Also, later on in the story, we discover that it's their innocence that helps them intuitively learn how to love such creatures, which implies two things: The first thing is that romance is about intuition ans innocence rather than knowledge and experience since none of them has no prior experience or knowledge of what it's like to be in relationship with a supernatural creature; the last thing is that women are more likely than men to have that kind of romance (in 3 out of the 4 examples shown above, women are the ones falling in love with supernatural creatures).
I think you bring up a good point about modern day romances. I never actually noticed how many of them were supernatural related. I'm not really surprised that three out four were women because women are generally attributed the trait that they are more sensitive and more likely to have these kinds of romances.
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