I have some time. A Shakespearean "mini" non-Zoom session on Willy's Romeo and Juliet and why folk ought to just let it die on the altar of "WTF" drug was Willy Shakespeare on.
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BTW: Shakespeare did write texts considered romances: The Tempest, A Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre (this one's something else). So can we refer to them instead of R&J? Asking for a Shakespearean friend who is me.
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Since R&J was based on an Italian novella, some might consider it a "romance" but if that's your logic, so to is Othello. (if you want go there amid some racist, sexist, serious slut-shaming BS). My point is Willy was quite clear on genre differences.
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Even Willy knew that love didn't equate to romance: to wit Hamlet and Antony & Cleopatra. So why are y'all advocates of R & J as romance but not Ham or A&C or Othello? The answer is simple: because your middle/high school English teacher said so.
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If you can leave behind all your home training, civic lessons, love thy neighbor as thy self training, you can abandon the idea that R&J is a romance. If not, think about why you need to cling to an idea so false that it "belies compare?"
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Ask yourselves why, when you want to belittle the romance genre, you fall on the R&J sword (rusty AF)? Why two dimwits should be idolized as a standard for romance? Ask yourselves, why the f*ck didn't Romeo take his "wife" with him to Mantua?
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What Shakespeare named his playscript.

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If you want to point to Shakespeare as a "romance writer" look to his settler colonialist text, "The Tempest." Even in the midst of some heavy duty racism, enslavement, and abuse, there is an HEA. Just not one involving non-whites.
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Thus ends our mini non-Zoom session on Romeo and Juliet ain't a romance (not sure it's a love story but that's another session).

Margo Hendricks/Sometimes a Shakespeare, always a romance author.