This paper will examine the romance genre in Slovenian literature with a special emphasis on its contemporary innovations and variants. The introduction will portray the presence of romance novels in the genre system of newer Slovenian literature, their status and their core features. The literary-historical overview will include the description of the traditional version of the romance novel genre, followed by its contemporary innovations in order to compare them. Specifically, the topic of intimacy, which is inherent to the contemporary Slovenian novel, will be studied. The central part of the paper will provide the analyisis of the novels Razdvojit ću pjenu od valova by Feri Lainšček, Ljubav u zraku by Jani Virk, Koliko si moja by Andrej E. Skubic and Pimlico by Milan Dekleva, with the emphasis on the discussion about the deviation in depicting romantic love in a traditional romance novel, as well as on the interpretation of the relationship of a love topic as a constituent of intimate and identity theme characteristic of a contemporary Slovenian novel. The conclusion will summarize the results of the investigation, primarily taking into account formal differences and the differences in the content between a romance novel and its innovations in contemporary Slovenian literature.