By contemporary definition, romance does have a happy ending. And romance is a sub-category of women's fiction, although women's fiction generally is used to refer to stories where the focus is more on a woman's experience, which may include romance, but the romance is less of a focus than other aspects of the protagonist's life.
I never much liked A Knight In Shining Armor, b/c while it purports to have a happy ending (the hero is reincarnated and the h/h meet again in contemporary times), I thought it was a sad ending, b/c the hero had to live out his sad, solitary life in the past before being reincarnated.
OTOH, I don't find the happy ending all that restrictive. Most genres have happy endings, in some sense. In mysteries, generally the bad guy is at least identified, if not jailed, which restores order and justice. Most of the sf/f I've read (with the exception of a really fascinating pair of books by Jacqueline Carey -- Banewreaker and Godslayer) have had happy endings for the protagonist, if not for the entire cast (and some of the cast in a romance can have a sad ending, just not the h/h). Most commercial fiction has a happy ending, at least in the sense of the protagonist surviving and saving the world or whatever his goal is. It's only in literary fiction where sad endings are rampant.
Perhaps think of it as a "satisfying" ending, rather than a happy ending, and you might view it as less of a restriction. Even in women's fiction, most of the time, the ending is upbeat to some extent. Even if the character dies, she's learned something in the process, or has come to a peace with respect to her life or whatever, so it's satisfying. It's not happy as in everyone singing "Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it's off to work we go," or whistling while they work, but it's satisfying, in that she's accomplished something and is content. Think of happy or satisfying as the opposite of nihilistic -- where the protagonist has gone through this big struggle, all for nothing, because life and even the struggle turn out to be pointless. The world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Anything that's not that grim could be considered at least a satisfying ending, if not entirely happy.
Notwithstanding that, if you don't read romance, if you don't "get" romance, then don't write it, b/c writing is hard enough already, and if you want to make money doing something you don't enjoy, there are plenty of better ways to do it. If you don't feel passionate about what you write, and no one's offering you a huge amount of money to write something you don't like, then why do it?
JD
