Can somebody explain exactly what Contemporary Romance is?

That'd be Romance but with a Contemporary twist such as, instead of getting swept up in a romance emotionally, you pull out a prenup and get the person to sign it to protect your property rights in advance. Instead of talking about the stars and moon and sending flowers, you discuss divorce settlements in advance of making a move. You know, modern day romance!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_romance

Generally, if you are writing in 2017, your story is set in the 2016-2018 time span. There's no magic, no spies, no funky stuff. It's a love story between two people (can be gay or lesbian, but I don't think it can be polyamorous and be still contemporary -- but maybe). It has a happy ending where the reader is satisfied that the two people who star in the story will be together for the long term.

Don't confuse it with Women's Fiction or Women's Journey.

EDIT: note that Jane Austen was writing contemporaries. She was writing at the turn of the 19th century, and her setting is pretty much the turn of the 19th century. Orwell was writing futuristic dystopian fantasy with 1984, because he wrote it in something like 1948. So even though it's past tense for us, it was the future for him.

"Contemporary romance" is someone's name for "what some, mostly younger, people are doing now about relating." In other words, it's a somewhat-made-up construct in search of data.

However, for purposes of class discussion and grading, it's probably YA literature.

Somewhat more helpful: "For Couples Only," "Finding a Higher Love," and "Love and Sexuality," by Aivahov.

Today.

As opposed to "historical romance" set in the French Revolution or California Gold Rush.

"When comes the heart" is historical romance.

"Like Cats & Dogs" is contemporary Romance.

A contemporary romance is set in a time that reads as if it's right now. Depending on how they're written, it's possible for romance novels forty years old to read like contemporaries--the authors take care not to sprinkle present-day references and technology in order to give their books greater longevity.

A romance, of course, is a novel in which the main story is two characters meeting and forming a romantic bond in spite of conflicts encountered as it happens. It absolutely must end happily-ever-after or happy-for-now.

Yes, I could, but considering what you've already told us about your reading-comprehension skills, you wouldn't be able to understand it, so it'd be a waste of time.

The word "contemporary" can have several different meanings, as an adjective - "living or occurring at the same time", and also as an adjective - "belonging to or occurring in the present; following modern ideas in style or design", and as a noun - "a person of roughly the same age as another; a person living at the same period of time as another."

In the literary sense it's used to talk about current writing. "Contemporary Romance" would be romantic fiction that's set in the present day.