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I'm not going to quote this in full, but to respond to the general thrust: I think this is basically wrong on most counts.
When people say "men don't like Romance," they don't mean that men dislike stories in which romance happens. They mean that men (tend to) dislike the genre/meta-genre of Romance fiction. They're basically correct, and it's not because Romance as a genre hates men. Most men, as the robot that wrote the linked essay eventually works around to, enjoy stories in which the male protagonist (who is probably an audience surrogate) gets the girl, but these stories are virtually never about getting the girl and they're certainly not about the process of getting the girl. They're almost always stories about doing Manly Things, of which getting the girl is but one (and usually a secondary one at that).
Romance, by contrast, very much is about that. The central feature of the story is the relationship between the two leads, and whatever external conflicts they face are primarily about catalyzing the development of the relationship. This is why Romance is so flexible in its setting/stakes. You can have a romantic narrative about a meek woman being abducted by alpha douchebag werewolf aliens from the Andromeda galaxy or one about a Type-A girlboss visting her hometown for the holidays and helping to save the local bakery run by her nauseating wholesome high school sweetheart.
(There's probably a deeper point here about the difference in the romantic experience for men and women, but I don't really feel interested or competent to get into it)
Strong disagree. If you look at the media ecosystem of Japan (anime, manga, light novels, visual novels) you will see that there is very much a market for romance stories aimed at men, rather than stories for men that happen to include a romance subplot:
It's not really a professional niche in the West, but indie authors can see the demand is there, and write works to satisfy it.
According to the same subreddit his evolution progressed even further since then.
On a different note I'm not that sure all of the series you mentioned are aimed at (young) men.
Most of them are shonen (aimed at young men):
A couple of them are seinen (aimed at adult men):
My Dress-Up Darling and Komi Can't Communicate did come across to me as more female-oriented than not.
How? Not only are the stories told from the perspective of male characters, but those characters are completely unattractive to women. Tadano is a soft, unthreatening nice guy whose special ability is reading the room. Gojo is a fucking autist with zero sex drive who enjoys making dresses for dolls; if he was living in a less repressed society, he would be sucking cock in a gay bar, and he would be happy, instead of forcing himself to get hard enough to bang the retarded gyaru.
If you look at anime which is actually aimed at women, the main character is always a woman (unless it's yaoi) and the love interest has the usual characteristics you find in romance book boyfriends; tall, rich, abusive, playboy, etc. For example, in Candy Candy, Candy's love interest is Terry, the aristocratic bad boy of Saint Paul's Academy.
I was going to say there must be some exceptions but I couldn't find any. I checked all of the villainess animes I watched recently and they are all nominally targeted at women. Whenever there's a significant opposite-sex romantic interest with the main character, the target audience is always the gender of the main character.
I shouldn't be surprised, this does follow fairly logically from human behavior, but I expected exceptions to be more readily available.
One exception would be An observation log of my Fiancée who calls herself a villainess. It is told from the POV of the main male romantic interest, but is still clearly a romance targeted at women.
Ooops you're right I have to eat my words. I remember the anime having scenes from the girl's pov but that must be false memories. The novel is unambiguous on this point.
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Except that ignores the large, anime-shaped elephant in the room.
There are a lot of manga and anime about romance aimed at boys and men. These titles have a male protagonist, usually more than a few love interests, and usually a fair amount of comedy and, occasionally, nudity, but they are undeniably male-aimed romance stories. The stories usually end (if they do end) with the protagonist choosing a single girl to start a relationship with.
Relatively recent examples include "Nisekoi", "Gotoubun no Hanayome", or "Bokutachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai". Older examples include "Love Hina" or "Ah! Megami-sama".
And that's not mentioning all the many, many male-aimed visual novels all about romance and relationships.
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To a large extent I agree with this, but I do think part of the reason men don't like the Romance genre is that it tends to be female-centered. Consider When Harry Met Sally, which is a romantic comedy that was arguably more male-centered. As I recall, it did pretty well among male audiences. That being said, yeah, as a man I liked Die Hard and Highlander a lot better than When Harry Met Sally. A basic hero story where the protagonist defeats the villain; saves the day; and gets the girl. In that order of importance.
Interestingly, When Harry Met Sally was primarily written by a woman, albeit with a lot of male input from Rob Reiner. When I think of fully male centered romcoms I guess I think of stuff like Crazy Stupid Love , which is really more of a buddy comedy than a romcom, and which was obviously written by a man.
I didn't see that movie, but I would probably nominate Garden State as a male-centered romcom. Which, as I recall, was written by a man.
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A lot of men do like ‘straight’ (or pure) romance. There are male fans of the Linklater ‘Before’ movies, there are plenty of men who watch heavily romance based anime or play games where romance is a central feature, for example.
Hell, I still love the first Twilight book. (The sequels were pretty trashy.) It's a great straight-forward romance with a genuinely creepy horror segment coming in at the end.
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