The thing about romance and romantic movies is that they can be somewhat melodramatic. For a lot of actors there's a certain cringe factor that's involved with that.
I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang Tod Browning and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don't care about the genre.
It's interesting - I always thought when I was doing more melodramatic stuff like 'Everwood' that the directors were constantly reeling me in and stopping me from being funny.