Against Against Romance

Falling in love is real and good

My friend Cyn doesn’t like this recent anti-romance trend we’ve been having on here. Sadly she feels under-qualified to push back. I have no such compunctions.

First of all I think she’s wrong to think of herself as under-qualified. Cyn, Aria, Aella, and I are all approximately of the same age and life stage; we’re all partnered, interested in children, some of us married, none of us married for very long. Whether or not our philosophies on love and strategies for partnering are good ones remains to be seen, and how our own lives and marriages turn out won’t give all that much information about those strategies. It will be N=1 in each case—it is always possible to follow an optimal strategy and still lose. Simply securing a husband isn’t a win condition; the win condition is a life well-lived.

Check in when we all look like this

So frankly we are all equally qualified to pugnaciously assert our view as the true and correct one, which I will now do:

Falling in love is real and good

Thing of Things has already responded to Aria’s series on stonefacedly optimizing for a suitable mate without letting your little fee-fees get too in the way. They write:

Be delusionally convinced that your partner is a 1 in a million catch, in defiance of all the evidence that they’re mid

I think it’s a great response and I agree with it.¹ I think Aria’s advice is misguided for anyone but a 35 year old woman who desperately wants children and is turning to strategies of last resort. But I don’t like this term “delusional positivity”.

Let’s call a spade a spade: it’s falling in love.

When you’re in love with someone their face is the most beautiful face in the world. And this isn’t a delusion; it is literally true. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When I fell in love with my husband, he became the most beautiful man in the world and that is just a straightforward fact about reality.

Aria thinks our problem is unrealistic romantic expectations.

For every real life story of love you’ve heard, you have watched ten times as many fictional examples and they are ten times more emotionally potent. Every day you’re watching beautiful people fall in love on Netflix or listening to your latest enemies to lovers audiobook, and your intuitive brain is registering it as real information about the real world.

My chronically single friends are rarely chronically single because eligible bachelors don’t like them. Their problem is that they don’t feel things for the eligible bachelors who like them. It’s not usually because they’re trying desperately to get someone out of their league — that’s been ground out of them by now. But they’re struggling to feel anything for the nice enough people they’re going on dates with.

Aella agrees:

our romantic lives get better if we can manage, somehow, against all our intense conditioning, to get the fairytale romances out of our heads

She thinks our romantic ideals are, essentially, pornbrained—that we fill the heads of our children with made-up fantasies that are in some sense “not real”. The superstimulus creates the expectation, which creates the experience.

I think this is totally backwards.

As a teenager I thought I was aromantic. I had no real drive to date for any reason besides giving the impression that I was socially normal enough to date if I wanted to. Romance fiction bored me. I was at the forefront of the war on Obligatory Movie Romances. I was constantly annoyed by how every song was about love or sex or romance in some capacity.² Don’t these people have anything else to talk about? Is there nothing else valuable about the human experience of being alive?

And then I fell in love, and discovered to my great consternation that all those stories, songs, movies, poems, etc. were simply describing the qualitative experience of being in love in a straightforward and accurate way.

Unfortunately, this nonsense is completely real.

If you have ever been in love you know exactly what I am talking about. It’s like an orgasm. If you’ve had one, it’s obvious.³

Maybe things like wanting your boyfriend to bring you flowers is a pornbrained unrealistic expectation. But the core experience of falling in love is not. It is a basic, if rare and perhaps not literally universal, faculty of human psychology.

I also reject completely the idea that because fickle “bad boy” types inspire strong feelings,⁴ our feelings of warmth and delight in our partners are somehow anti-correlated with their spouselike qualities. But there isn’t an anti-correlation. There’s simply hardly any correlation at all.

There is a reason there is a literary tradition around love potions and Cupid’s arrows. That is, simply, what it is like. You fall in love because God chose that moment to strike you down. Whatever rhyme or reason there is to it, it’s irrelevant.

BORING HEDGE PARAGRAPH: Being in love with someone is not a sufficient reason to marry them. Of the three people I have been in love with, two would have made terrible spouses. And love, while tremendously meaningful, is not an unalloyed good. It can be dangerous and destabilizing. Certainly love is recently making my life more difficult and complicated, not less.

But there’s no need to get so galaxy-brained about it that we start looking into potential husband’s mouths to examine the quality of their teeth, at least not as an initial strategy. Thing of Things writes:

But when you notice yourself really really really liking someone, and they seem to really really really like you, cling to that and don’t let go.

I’ll be rather more direct.

Marry someone that you are in love with, then try to stay in love with them.

Good luck.

1. Particularly on the matter of whether arranged and love marriages are equally happy—of course the natural standard for a “good” arranged marriage is lower than for a love marriage!

2. This was especially grating as a fanfiction-enjoying teenager. Almost every fanfic is a romance and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why and I was very ornery about it.

3. Fine, fine—sometimes the orgasm is kind of weird. But think of being a kid and jerking off for the first time and not being able to tell if you were doing it right. When you did it right, you could tell.

4. I, too, have obsessed over a shitty Skinner Box boyfriend