Curses in romance aren’t about spectacle; they’re pressure chambers. They strip a love story to its most primal question: Can love survive what can’t be fought, can’t be reasoned with, and can’t be killed? These stories thrive on longing, impossibility, intimacy, and the silent battle against a villain that doesn’t have a face.
Curses in Romance
A curse is the one enemy love can’t negotiate with.
It doesn’t swing a sword, fire a gun, or shout a threat you can arrest.
It waits while narrowing the world it lives in, making every glance, touch, and decision become heavily weighted with consequence.
And in romance, that’s rocket fuel for a good story.
Famous Fairytale Romances with Curses Created by Witches
We’ve all heard them, read them, and watched those curses in romance before. So there’s no surprise when I mention:
Beauty and the Beast:
The most iconic cursed romance of all time is Beauty and the Beast.
A prince is cursed by an enchantress (a witch-like fairy woman, depending on the retelling) to become the beast who stumbles around in his manor. She punishes his cruelty by transforming him into a beast until love proves his humanity.
The heroine doesn’t try to break the curse; she simply falls in love because she sees the man buried beneath.
The curse creates the conflict, but love creates the revelation… and the cure.
Snow White:
Well, we all know it was the Evil Queen who used witchcraft and a poisoned apple. It’s not always named a “curse,” but it functions like one: a spell-driven death-sleep triggered by a witch’s intent.
It’s where slumber is the sentence, and true love is the key – by that first kiss.
Sleeping Beauty:
Sleeping Beauty’s curse, cast by Maleficent (or an equivalent dark fairy/witch figure in older retellings). It was decreed as a baby that after the prick of a spindle/thimble, the curse would put her into enchanted sleep. Huh? Heard that before have we?
But the conflict is the threat that hangs over her life as a baby. And the consequence is that it affects everyone in her home.
And the cure?
That first kiss. Again.
Werewolves and Vampires: Creatures and Their Curses in Romance
In paranormal romance, the well-told gothic monsters can be made to read like a curse, but some stories layer additional witch-driven magic on top to make their love stories fated or endangered.
Lots of modern romance staples for those cursed creatures made into flesh are:
- Immortality
- Driven hunger
- Transformation
- Monstrosity
They are walking metaphors for the unwalkable path based on life stuck under a curse.
But if we added a curse to the cursed?
Well, doesn’t that make the story more interesting, such as in…
The Werewolf Curse – Vampire Diaries
In The Vampire Diaries mythology, there’s the werewolf curse that can lie dormant within the family bloodline for generations. It activates only when someone with werewolf blood kills someone by accident or ill intent.
That storyline comes up in the Lockwood family arc, where Tyler Lockwood triggers the werewolf curse after accidentally killing someone. Caroline, a vampire and supposed enemy to werewolves, is one of the first people to help him understand and cope with this curse, training him through that first full moon. And it’s this shared vulnerability that is part of why they grow close and become lovers.
But then it gets complicated by supernatural politics when Klaus intervenes… and their high-stakes romance becomes heartbreak, to love fighting for its place.
(But in TVD world, love never lasts forever, which is ironic considering half the cast is immortal!)
The Hybrid Curse – Vampire Diaries/ The Originals
The Hybrid Curse that was placed on the vampire Klaus Mikaelson by his mother was to suppress his werewolf side. It restricted his identity and power until the curse is broken through a complicated ritual.
Though the ritual itself wasn’t romantic, this curse shows that even immortals bound by mythology, power, and prophecy can face their own curses — whether that’s a sire bond, ancient magic placed on them, or the emotional weight of raising a child in a cursed world.
In Other Paranormal Romances Where Curses Make the Romance
In paranormal romance, curses don’t just endanger love, they define identity. The question shifts from breaking the curse to bearing it, or bending a life around it without letting it consume the heart at the centre of the story.
One of the most compelling examples of adaptation over eradication lives in J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood. The character Rhage—nicknamed ‘Hollywood’—has a curse of a literal dragon bound to his body. The enchantment means he can’t allow closeness without risking annihilating the woman he loves, making it the greatest conflict to romantic intimacy itself — the danger of closeness, not the lack of desire.
The tragedy of Rhage’s curse, in Lover Eternal, makes the romance sharper, the longing unbearable, and the eventual emotional surrender feel colossal when J.R. Ward doesn’t break the curse but flips it, allowing Rhage to accept it, and so does his love.
More Examples of Curses in Romance Stories
The following examples of where curse-style magic isn’t just background flavour — it forces characters into impossible choices (stay cursed and alone, or break it and risk everything), which is exactly the kind of emotional conflict romance readers respond to.
Other memorable curse-driven romances readers gravitate toward include:
Shrek (William Steig / DreamWorks adaptation):
Being an ogre never looked so good in this iconic movie!
Shrek showed how the love of his lifestyle and who he was acceptable.
But when Princess Fiona—who is actually the cursed one—breaks the curse and accepts life as an ogre to be with Shrek…
Even if she is a princess who can save herself from the fire-breathing dragon, she’s bound by story conventions, only to rewrite them where Shrek and Fiona (including Donkey and that dragon) get their HEA.
Outlander (Diana Gabaldon):
Time-travelling becomes a kind of generational sentence in Outlander. The curse of separation, love enduring across impossible distances between Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser, shows love across time, while being repeatedly ripped apart by history.
The Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux):
Erik’s curse is the disfigurement of his face, believing he’s unlovable, and that fear of rejection turns into an obsession.
As a tragic gothic love story, he doesn’t win the love of Christine, who chooses another. But it shows that not all cursed love stories end in union. Some end in heartbreak.
The Phantom sits firmly in the second camp — love that transforms the hero, but never becomes the heroine’s future.
Owens Family Curse from Practical Magic (Alice Hoffman):
The curse originated with Maria Owens, an ancestor of the Owens family, who was heartbroken and fearing love after a betrayal. She cast a spell on herself to never fall in love again, but it became a generational curse affecting all her descendants.
It’s the curse that “dooms any man who falls in love with an Owens woman“.
This is why the Owens women are both feared and seen as dangerous, and why they fear love themselves.
The wider book series (including The Rules of Magic and The Book of Magic) explores the theme of the Owens family’s cursed bloodline — a lineage that carries consequences for love.
The Power of the Curse in Romance
Damsel under stress, distress, or just a wannabe witch who makes a mistake, there are countless variants found in countless paranormal/fantasy romance novels where the curse becomes the crucible, not the conclusion.
What makes the curse in romance so powerful is that a curse in romance is not a problem you can solve with fists. It’s the need to survive, to break it or accept it, reshaping their life as a result of this curse’s interactions.
These curses often ask lovers to sacrifice control, logic, and certainty. That’s why the conflict lands harder—because the battle is internal, intimate, and unanswerable until love answers it.
These conflicts work because the curse is an enemy that is invisible, unbeatable, and unfeeling. That somehow love becomes the only logic left standing.
And when the HEA finally arrives, it tastes sweeter for having won that battle.
Why Do Romance Readers Love a Curse in Their Romance?
Because it allows for an intimacy of the journey between two people who try to break, adapt, or just cope with life under the curse.
A curse isn’t flashy; it’s torment on the soul that shows those cursed what is hidden beneath, bringing to the surface their greatest fears and vulnerabilities that you can’t help but love the hero/heroine that goes through these changes.
The cursed trope, and the arc that follows, is a story that will be told again and again, because it’s a curse that has the power to make a romance so much more than just a simple love story.
The Curse That Makes the Romance
In Forget Forever, the curse this romance story has claws but no dragons. It’s ancestral, unseen, and whispered through an old family manor.
And the lovers…
Do they face it? Break it? Or do they let it take over their lives, separating them forever…
If you love a good curse in a romance story, then you’ll love Forget Forever, found here>>
