A romance is always a love story, but not all love stories are romances, in the modern literary sense of the word. A romance novel (esp. back in 1988) is strictly a courtship story, which ends (the Happily Ever After, or HEA) when the couple get married. https://twitter.com/lno09281978/status/1281359232718245888
Romance novels spend roughly 90% of their space concentrating on the relationship between the couple; plot is fine, but subsidiary. And all romance novels are one-offs; they don't have sequels, because once the courtship concludes, the story is Over.
Outlander could just about qualify as a courtship story, though it has a few features that you wouldn't have found in _any_ 1980's romance--like a bigamous triangular relationship, male virginity and male rape (plus a lot of blood, violence and digressions into medicine), but...
it doesn't qualify on any of the other grounds. And to compound its crimes <g>...it's 300,000 words. This, in a time when romance novels were only published in paperback and averaged 70,000 words (including both category romances and somewhat longer single-title books).
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