How much do readers actually want marriage of convenience? Not by opinion — by count. Tropesmith tracks individual reader requests across roughly 40 sources (BookTok, Reddit, Goodreads, StoryGraph, AO3 and the retailer charts) and classifies every one by trope. Here is what the numbers say right now.
Figures from Tropesmith's reader-demand engine, counted 2026-08-24 09:13. Reader requests = how often readers asked for it; underserved = the share our engine flags as unmet by current books; signal reach = the combined audience of the posts carrying that demand.
Marriage of convenience binds two leads by contract before feeling ever enters the picture: a green card, an inheritance, a title, a business deal, a scandal to bury. The arrangement forces proximity and intimacy on a schedule, and the romance grows in the gap between the paperwork and what they actually start to want.
It is a proximity-engine trope with a built-in clock, which is why it travels across contemporary, historical and romantasy. It layers cleanly onto enemies-to-lovers and forbidden romance, and its underserved figure shows steady appetite for the slow slide from obligation to real — a lane with more demand than the shelf answers.
A high request count tells you marriage of convenience is wanted. A high underserved figure tells you the shelf hasn't caught up. When both are high, that's demand the market hasn't answered yet — an open lane rather than a crowded one.
Related trope dynamics readers ask for alongside it — each with its own live demand:
A Tropesmith Map scores your exact trope stack on live demand versus supply — and names the gap you can own.
Build my Map → See a real sample Map first →Tropesmith logs 2,989 individual reader requests for marriage of convenience, and flags 97% of that demand as underserved — readers ask for it faster than new books satisfy the exact flavour they want.
Marriage of convenience binds two leads by contract before feeling ever enters the picture: a green card, an inheritance, a title, a business deal, a scandal to bury. The arrangement forces proximity and intimacy on a schedule, and the romance grows in the gap between the paperwork and what they actually start to want.
Yes. Tropesmith's reader-demand engine flags 97% of tracked demand for it as unmet by current books, across 2,989 reader requests — a clear gap between what readers ask for and what the shelf offers.
Every number we publish is counted, not estimated. This is the corpus behind it, as it stood on 21 August 2026.
Counted 2026-08-24 09:13 UTC by direct query against the Tropesmith corpus. Method: how we read reader demand · how a Map is built.
Live data on this page is drawn from Tropesmith's market snapshots and reader-demand engine — refreshed as the market moves. Part of the romance market intelligence hub.