#62 The new romantics
so come on, come along with me
The sun is heating up, and so are the streets. THE STREETS! They feel so romantic lately. Just the other day, I missed my tram home by a solid 15 seconds — the kind of tram you miss due to an ill-fated red light, just across the street — and I thought to myself, after a moment of frustration, well, I just wasn’t meant to take that one. Figures. I think these thoughts fairly often nowadays, when small little stones collect in my shoe, when inconveniences arise and I want to bitch and moan about them. So I get on the tram and I start blasting So High School and I am entranced by it, listening to it in a loop until I head out during a light spring summer evening, early May.
The scene: a bridge, crossing over it, the end of Kinkerstraat and the beginning of my right turn home. A couple — it’s their first, maybe second date, I can tell — the way she puts her arms around his neck and throws her head back, laughing, a little self-conscious but also with a dash of abandonment. His back is to me, and after laughing, they kiss — it feels like the beginning of something. Kismet! The chorus of So High School begins ringing in my ears just as I’m walking past them and I swear my feet feel lighter, my face breaks into a smile and I keep on going, crossing a bridge, leaving them behind. You can almost feel the electricity of it, cinematic, the world an open, waiting cup.
This particular moment may seem mundane and even overly dramatized to the average viewer, but this specific window of time was a mirage of sorts, a glimpse into who I’ve always been, someone who hangs every word a crush says, a yearner and a piner with a deep unshakeable belief that despite it all, in spite of everything, maybe because of everything, this kind of feeling is always possible. I was unsure of that, lately; I think rounding the corner of my late twenties has been insightful but also a little brutal in this area. Year-long relationships swirling the end of their timeline, commitments that seemed to spell out forever fading away from your fingertips, growing apart, changing of seasons. The intimacy that’s been built up over time falls apart under scaffolding that was once thought sturdy, and it was, but it just didn’t account for the changes and valleys that becoming someone new with every year can bring. Life gets a little weird. Things are unpredictable and uncertain and volatile, and the grasping at straws of it and breaths and gulps of air of it — certainty — is a little more desperate lately, until it isn’t one morning for me, until I think, none of this is set in stone and that doesn’t need to frighten me into a neurotic state of anxiety, a person whose only desire, above all things, is control.
This is a very different, maybe even opposing energy, to the art of romance. I think — have I lost it? I think, is it gone? All those grand illusions about big gestures and declarations, handwritten love letters, this monumental effort and display of affection I saw in all those movies growing up. And yet I was so quick to gloss over the romance of my friends, remembering my favorite dish and cooking it for me, the romance of a date, eating thai food under bright pink lights and having a beer, the romance of getting ready for a party with your friends and, delicately, one of them places a row of eyelashes on each end of your eyelids.
Romance has become a thing of the past, some say. Where are the gestures of huge, romantic love and the dark jokes of men used to go to war flood my Instagram algorithm every once in a while, whether it’s a line delivered by a comedian or a meme with a dark, ironic twist. Romance in the 21st century has been picked at and ridiculed the past few years — and they say romance is dead — they quip sardonically, and people love to complain, and the digital age has ruined everything, and Tinder is a blazing trash can of all the remains and the leftovers and the ones looking for sex.
No! Maybe romance is also in sharing dinner and going for a long walk at sundown and hugging someone closer and feeling so close, I'm right here. Romance is mundanity and everyday-ness and joy and the middle-aged lady who said bless you when a big sneeze escaped me, biking fast down a long street. THANK YOU I tell her and I feel it: this bubbling feeling that romance is possible, that the kismet of it and the joy of it is always around you (that being corny is the way to go) that feeling home and holding hands is the most romantic thing of all.
There is some value to be found, I think, in the work of redefining romance as this ongoing relationship to things and people. I’d go as far as to say that it’s one of the most important strengths and muscles we can build through life, especially as we get older. Life can be swift and brutal and far from joyious, and there’s not a lot we can do most of the time when we’re faced with the immensity of grief and multiplicity of tragedies at any given point in time. And then there’s romance — the romcom is a burgeoning genre once more, especially those with an air of nostalgia — a window of time where you can suspend all belief and just fall in love, a lot, or a little bit. There’s a reason we’re flipping back the channels, the storylines, a retro feel to the heroine of times past, a reckoning for Bridget Jones lovers. Romance is necessary. It adds a little pep to your step. It makes life more flavorful.
I had a short-lived existential crisis of approximately 3 days where I thought all notions of romance had been cruelly zapped from me as a result of heartbreak. Even though my heart has healed since then and I’ve got some hard-earned quasi-wisdom to show for it, it’s like I’ve sobered up from drinking overly sweet and extremely alcoholic cocktails and after a solid 800mg of ibuprofen and more ice than water, I’ve noticed the syrup isn’t real and the alcohol feels good, but isn’t good for me. Maybe those were the late teens making an exit from my body, the illusion that only romantic love can redeem you and save you, that only this kind of love is the one that will show you who you are, what your worth is, what you’re capable of. Romance holds you in all its ways, I’ve told you that before. And I think my Instagram feed has to agree - more and more, I see love letters to friends, about friendship, I see the changing seasons of a friend's relationship to her parents; growing sweeter, more tender, with time. And that’s the thing, isn’t it. Time can make you tender. It can melt away what isn’t real, if you let it.
I recently read a book called Instructions for Heartbreak, although curiously, I have left the world of the heartbroken, and I find romance in the characters’ deep friendships instead. And I think about how the grand gesture of romance isn’t in the person who came back or getting an apology you gave up on ever receiving, or a message acknowledging how special what you had was. Romance is taking the long walk back to the train with a friend, talking things through, holding your hand as you sit down for the ride home. It’s filled with love, that moment, it can look cinematic from a different point of view. It’s growing so easy for me to forget the romantic things a life can hold if you just open to it, the world a waiting cup.