Dating Made It Impossible to Write Romance… and I Want to Write It Again
Before I begin, a note on my perspective: I am a young adult cis woman alluding to the cis-het experience. I’m going to talk about writing romance, not love. I won’t touch on love, since love is a tougher concept to pin down.
When I was a teenager, I wrote a lot. I wrote stories and fanfictions all throughout my youth, almost all involving romance. With that in mind, I have a problem: I haven’t been able to write a single romance since I started dating many years ago.
What is “Romance” and Why Do I Care?
When a noun, one of Google’s definitions of romance is “a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.” The other definition is “a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.” One of the noun definitions concerns more than one person, the other noun definition can be a solitary experience. I like both and I adore reading stories about both. However, the one I understand less and less the more I date is the first one, the one associated with love. Perhaps that is why I have been gravitating towards romance novels when choosing audiobooks to keep me company while I cook, clean, and do other tasks that don’t require my whole brain. Once upon a time I could write romance into the stories I created. Once upon a time, romance was something I could grasp and put on the page. Sort of. After that act became difficult, I realized I care whether I’ll be able to write romance again because I want to be capable of the full scope of human emotion; I want to be capable of letting other people affect me. I want to interact and react. I want sparks and explosions. I want to let myself feel and then I want to people I trust and let in to push the bounds of my feelings so I’m not experiencing my emotions alone anymore.
“The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.” – The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
I care about romance in books because to me, writing is like a conscious “testing scenarios” experience. There is a common idea that dreams are the brain’s way of testing out situations, actions, and consequences in a safe place. To me, writing is my waking brain doing that very action. I want to test the ideas because I want to hope they’ll be part of my own life. However, if they never end up in my own life, I want to at least know that I got to experience them dynamically in my mind. Not only do I want to stop being afraid of feeling things, I want to stop being afraid of imagining things as well.
What’s Making It So Hard to Write Romance—Specifically?
It’s not exciting anymore when someone shows interest
I remember when it was exciting if someone showed interest in me, and I could write about that feeling with the same youthful gaiety. But now that I’ve dated more than I care to, I can’t see that spark of joy in easy romance anymore. I can’t picture romance with someone now that I feel like I’ve exhausted the basics. Beyond the basic, romance in real life is messy and faulty and subject to the whims of human disfunction. This was something I was always vaguely aware of, but now its deeply ingrained and left me quite jaded. Butterflies are easy and fleeting, that being fem-presenting even when you’re not “a ten” means most cis-het men will show interest even if it’s for a moment, being called beautiful is not the glowing compliment to an adult woman that it is to a teenage girl (cue the Swan Princess’s, “thank you. But what else?”), and interest from someone does not equate to a relationship. I have realized that what you want when you’re young is to be seen, but once you’re older… that’s nothing. You’re tired, you’ve been seen enough, and you just want something that stays. You can’t write romance when you’re tired.
In real life, romantic partners don’t fall into your lap
Not only am I tired from the experience, but I have discovered another thing about romance in literature versus real life that has made it difficult to put romance on the page: romance in novels usually doesn’t start because the heroine is looking for a lover—quite the opposite, in fact—the heroine often shirks love and it sneaks into her life persistently and unexpectedly (as if romance is inescapable); however, in real life once a heroine passes a certain age, romance is something she must seek out intentionally. Ideal romantic partners don’t fall in her lap in the real world. To further iterate on the issue of finding a romantic partner, the post-modern age has brought on dating site and then the dating app. People don’t end up on those by accident; being on those sites is a deliberate choice. So, the whirlwind romantic experience of accidentally falling in love doesn’t occur. Real people must be open to the idea of romance and go out to find it.
Now I Know What’s Up, What Tactics Do I Use to Write Romance Again?
After determining why I care about writing romance and what’s making it difficult to do so, I don’t know for certain which tactics to employ so I can put pen to paper again; but I have a few ideas.
If I can’t see romance how I did when I was younger, I can no longer connect to the storylines I gravitated towards back then. If those tropes and experiences are no longer exciting to me, I need to figure out what could be exciting now.
(At this point while writing this, I did have a mini existential crisis over not finding joy in connecting to other people and wondering if I’ll ever be able to find the same level of joy that I once did and hoping beyond all hope that the feeling was extremely temporary and I can find joy in connection to others again because if I can’t, I will be extremely sad. But enough about that.)
To write as prolifically as I did in my teen years, I need to figure out which moments of connection brought me joy and why. I can reflect on the connections that lit me up and stop worrying about whether they were romantic or not. I will write better stories when I relish in all the ways people are wonderful. There is joy in connecting with another person through conversation, activity, or silence—just co-existing on the same wavelength for a moment—because people are usually good and seek connection, even when the stars don’t exactly align. People seek connection and connection builds stories. Perhaps I can write a romance again if I focus less on the butterflies of being seen and more on the deeper, soulful yearning for a partner to share hearts and minds.
Romance isn’t in the fleeting glances, the chase, or the kiss anymore… it’s in the moments that two hearts and minds meet in the middle. I need to dream about the new romance and hope for it, and that’s a scary thing to do for someone who doesn’t have a clear picture of what the new dream/hope of romance should look like.
New romance needs to grow and mature with me. I’ll start with what I know, even if I don’t have the whole picture.
Now when I write about romantic connection, it won’t include these:
Fleeting glances
“You’re so beautiful”s
Accidental touches (my characters will be adults. They know what they’re doing.)
Excessive touches
Possessiveness
Protectiveness
Enemies to lovers (no matter how much I love that trope. I just can’t see how it translates to healthy, mature romance.)
When I write about romantic connection from now on it will include some or all of these:
Passionate eye-contact
Apt listening
Making time together
Making promises and keeping them, or at least trying really hard to
Saying “I love you” and showing it
Being a support system for each other
Weathering storms
Boundaries
Hopefully these tactics work. If they don’t, I can always revisit it again later.
Writing romance is tough right now, but maybe that’s because I need to dream of something that matches where I want to be next and stop dwelling on what used to be. I’ll give it my best and see what I come up with.
“Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel[.]” – Oscar Wilde
References:
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. (1994). The Swan Princess [DVD].
Wilde, O. (2003). The Picture of Dorian Gray. Penguin Classics.
Wilde, O., & Ellmann, R. (1998). The artist as critic: Critical writings of oscar wilde. University of Chicago Press.