The romance is one of the most notoriously fuzzy genres in literary scholarship, a problem only exacerbated by the fact that there is no indigenous term for it in any of the premodern literatures to which it is applied. Nonetheless, scholars have identified and analyzed “romances” across the Eurasian continent, in Imperial and Byzantine Greek literature, in Medieval French and German, in classical Georgian, in “high” (or courtly) Persian and Ottoman, in “middle” (popular) Arabic and Urdu, and in Sanskrit and Chinese. Given such breadth and scope, the romances identified in these traditions are undoubtedly different in each context; yet clearly there are common elements running through this massive corpus, a sufficient number of distinctive features that allow us to read these diverse texts as part of the same generic family, akin to Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography, “I know it when I see it.” The existence of such “family resemblances” between the Middle Eastern iterations of this genre and those of its Greek and European counterparts suggest great possibilities for comparative study, studies of the sort that allow us to track how these world systems interact with each other; but to further this work, we would do well to think further about what the “romance” means (or what we mean by it) in the context of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman literature, and how does this use of the term line up with what we find in other disciplines and area studies. That is the aim of this paper: through a long-view survey of the genre in its Middle Eastern context, we attempt to bring some more clarity to what the romance is in our field, and more importantly, consider what we might gain from a term that would allow us to read these texts as participants in a much larger global genre.