: Characterization: is there any guidance for writing "the romantic interest"? I've recently been researching and discussing characters and character roles, mostly off the back of feedback on a romance

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I'm sorry that someone gave you feedback like that. Critique and feedback is supposed to be constructive, and help you improve and frankly, that person sounds rude. Perhaps there is more context there, but if I were you I would not dwell too long on that person's comments.

To address the actual issue, let's work on the assumption that there is a problem with your love interest character, though that's not necessarily the case.

I'm not sure you're approaching it from the right angle. 'Love Interest' may be this character's role, but it should not be the be all and end all of their character. They need to be a character in their own right, with desires, flaws and quirks. Thinking of them only as a 'love interest' is probably why you're getting stuck in the cliches, especially 'tall, dark and handsome'.

So, I would recommend doing normal character development for this character, forgetting for a while that they are the love interest. You might want to start with an archetype - pick one of the enneagram types as a starting point for your character. You can see summarised descriptions of these here (this is my site) www.novel-software.com/enneagramcharacterarchetypes
Then you could answer the following questions:

What does the character want?
What does the character need?
What is the character's flaw?
What are some of their postitive traits?
What are some of their negative traits?
What are their fears / phobias?
What is their life philosophy / motto?

A few more comments...
While cliches exist, I don't think that character roles are necessarily that prescriptive - you can follow the cliches if you want, but plenty of people don't and you'll find plenty of examples of love interest roles that aren't dark and mysterious. There are lots of love interests who are blonde, grinning, goofy, witty. Admittedly, they are rarely short... But male love interests in particular can get away with not even being traditionally handsome in some cases (though of course it helps).

Is it different for male, female, bi-sexual, British, American, young, old etc?

Yes. But each of these is only a single factor in the tapestry that makes up the character, it is not their only feature, which defines their character, and there will be overlap between these profiles.

it's widely accepted in the western market that the male love interest is strong, dark and mysterious, including a long list of examples such as Edward Cullen, Tony Stark, Mr Darcy, any Hugh Jackman

I think this list is interesting, in that these characters are actually quite different, especially Tony Stark, who I don't think of as dark and mysterious at all. He's funny and quirky. Edward Cullen is brooding, I suppose, and Mr Darcy is certainly understated, so I guess you could say he's mysterious in a way. But think of any character played by Matthew Mcconaughey when he still did rom coms before his mcconaughaissance into epic actor.

I hope that's some help.

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Usually if the love interest is uninteresting, it's because the author isn't very interested in him or her as a character. There's any number of (often quite successful) books and movies where the love interest is basically a symbol, or a object, or plays a functional role in the story but doesn't have any inner life of his or her own.

It seems to me that going down an enumerated list of "attractive" traits is exactly the wrong way to solve this --if it needs to be solved. It may be that your story doesn't required a fully realized love interest for one reason or another. But if that's not the case, you need to create a character you actually find interesting --and NOT just because that person matches your own mental list of for a dream girl or boy. An interesting love interest would be interesting even if he or she wasn't the love interest.

Consider the love interest in Almost Famous. What makes her compelling is that she has her own story arc, even including a love interest of her own (that is not the main character). Her story basically stands alone without his. That's a lot of what makes her so attractive to the main character (a thinly disguised stand-in for the writer) and in turn to us, the viewer.

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