Center’s novels, including The Love Haters, fall into the genres of contemporary romance and romantic comedy. Although The Love Haters deals with serious subject matter such as heartbreak, insecurity, and illness, it is underpinned by lighthearted and comedic moments. Contemporary romances are categorized by their happy endings and familiar plotlines but often focus on the main characters’ personal growth and the obstacles they must overcome to achieve their happy ending. As in The Love Haters, most contemporary romance heroines and heroes are flawed; these narratives often show them helping each other overcome barriers not only to becoming romantically involved but also to being better and happier people.

Just as contemporary romance novels rely on familiar narrative structures, they also often involve well-worn tropes, archetypes, and situations, such as enemies-to-lovers relationships, marriage-of-convenience plotlines, and small-town settings. The Love Haters uses many conventions typical of contemporary romance novels, including the forced proximity trope, in which two people who are trying to avoid their attraction to one another are continually forced to be around one another. Forbidden love is another common romance convention used in The Love Haters, as Katie and Hutch confront the fears and priorities that prevent them from becoming romantically involved and hinder them personally.

The Love Haters and many of Center’s other novels also fall into the popular subgenre of the “workplace romance.” In workplace romances, the central characters have a professional relationship that later becomes romantic. Though workplace romances vary widely in their plots, settings, and time periods, books in this subgenre are essentially defined by the tension between characters’ romantic interests and their professional duties. In novels like Elena Armas’s The Spanish Love Deception, Ali Hazelwood’s Love, Theoretically, and Rachel Lynn Solomon’s The Ex Talk, characters’ attraction to one another often causes issues or distractions in their professional lives. Novels in this genre also typically use the forced proximity trope popular in the broader romance genre. In novels like Center’s The Bodyguard and The Rom-Commers, characters with professional relationships serendipitously end up spending time with one another outside of the professional sphere, as in The Love Haters. As a whole, the subgenre of workplace romance often heightens the stakes of romantic conflict, as characters in these novels have more at stake than their hearts alone.