You didn’t know that.

Don’t feel bad — neither did most of Europe.

Compare this to the 4th of July, which Americans celebrate with the energy of people who have been waiting their entire lives for an excuse to eat a hotdog while watching something explode.

Americans disagree on almost everything right now — politics, vaccines, the shape of the earth — but the one thing they reliably agree on is this: America is great. Possibly the greatest. Probably the greatest. Definitely the greatest. The phrase “the greatest country in the world” is delivered in American movies and media with the straight-faced conviction usually reserved for papal declarations and Google Maps.

The 4th of July is not a public holiday. It is a religion. There are fireworks. There are parades. There is a national mood.

Europe had a Tuesday (well, it was Saturday actually, but you get my point).

To be fair, Europe has a branding problem that starts at the source documents.

The Declaration of Independence opens with: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Excellent copy. Whoever wrote this understood that you need to give people something to put on a flag.

Europe Day, meanwhile, commemorates the Schuman Declaration — a proposal made on 9 May 1950 by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, who suggested that France and Germany pool their coal and steel production under a shared authority. The reasoning was elegant: if you share the same industrial base, it’s considerably harder to go to war with each other. This proposal is the foundation of what eventually became the European Union.

The Schuman Declaration contains the following line: “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.”

This is a project management brief.

A very good project management brief — accurate, honest, and as it turned out, prophetic — but not exactly something you embroider on a cushion. Nobody has ever shouted DE FACTO SOLIDARITY at a sporting event. There are no fireworks that spell out “concrete achievements.” You see where the EU’s image as cluster of very boring technocrats comes from.

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Which is a shame. Because what Europe has actually done in 76 years is really quite extraordinary.

The longest period of peace in the continent’s recorded history. Before the EU, Western Europe had been doing large-scale war roughly every generation for about a thousand years. Since the project began — nothing. This is not an accident. It is, as Schuman correctly identified, the result of building shared interests until war becomes economically inconvenient and politically absurd. Not glamorous. Functional, which in European policy is considered high praise.

The largest single market and trade bloc in the world — bigger than the US, bigger than China — built out of twenty-seven countries with twenty-four official languages and extremely strong opinions about each other’s food (especially in Italy—see below).

And freedom of movement: the right of every EU citizen to live, work, study, or retire in any of those twenty-seven countries without asking anyone’s permission. This is so remarkable that most Europeans have completely stopped noticing it.

Except, as it happens, the British. Who had it, voted to give it up, and are now discovering — with each new form, each new visa application, each new bewildering piece of administrative theatre — exactly what it was they had. Nothing sharpens appreciation quite like absence.

Europe is, I think, the goofy uncle. You know the one. High-waisted jeans. Comb-over. No discernible personal charisma. At family gatherings he talks about regulatory frameworks and harmonised standards while everyone else is on their third glass of wine and arguing about something much more interesting.

Then someone mentions music.

Turns out he’s had a heavy metal band for thirty years. Writes all the lyrics himself. Plays bass.

The band is called De Facto Solidarity.

In your twenties, sex was performance. You were auditioning. For what, exactly, was unclear, but it felt important to seem effortless, experimental, and faintly porn-star adjacent. You were trying to be good at sex in the same way people try to be good at accents: confidently, and with very little actual skill.

After 30, the performance becomes exhausting. You don’t want to impress anyone; you want to enjoy yourself and still be able to stand up afterward. This is not a decline. This is a strategic pivot.

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Bodies, by this point, have opinions. Knees make noises. Hips file formal complaints. Recovery time — which you previously treated as a myth, like low-calorie prosecco — becomes something you factor in. There is less spontaneity and more negotiation, which sounds unsexy until you realize that negotiation prevents both injuries and resentment. Sex stops being about surprise and starts being about consent in its most practical form: Does this work for you? Are you comfortable? Should we get water?

None of this belongs in a film. All of it belongs in real life.

What changes most, though, is honesty. You say what you like. You say what you don’t.

You stop powering through out of politeness, which — in retrospect — you did for a mortifying number of years, and so did they, and everyone was worse off. Clarity turns out to be far more important than mystery, which is an upsetting realization after years of being told the opposite.

The upside is that when sex works at this stage, it really works. Not in a performative way, but in a grounded one. Less adrenaline, more presence. Less spectacle, more attunement. You’re not trying to be desired by everyone — just fully wanted by someone who is actually there.

Sex after 30 isn’t about doing more. It’s about pretending less.

And while that may not sound exciting, consider that most of us spent our twenties having sex we didn’t particularly enjoy with people we were quietly performing for. The bar, it turns out, was lower than the floor.

Emma, pull yourself together. You have a house. You have a husband who adores you. He’s not exactly Brad Pitt, fine, but he’s also not setting fire to anything. Try a hobby. Learn to embroider. Take a walk. Good God, woman.

I was very wise at sixteen.

Then life happened. A few relationships that started like cinema and ended like a particularly bleak documentary. The specific heartbreak of watching something passionate slowly become comfortable, then routine, then — if you’re unlucky — invisible. The discovery that the feeling at the beginning, that slightly unhinged, can’t-eat, slightly-losing-your-mind feeling, is, in fact, a chemical high. And like all chemical highs, it ends. And like all chemical highs, once you know what it feels like, real life seems a little flat by comparison.

I reread Bovary in my late twenties. Emma, I owe you an apology.

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For those who haven’t read it — and no judgment, it’s not exactly a beach read — here’s the situation. Emma Rouault is a French farmer’s daughter, raised on romantic novels, who marries a country doctor named Charles Bovary. Charles is gentle, devoted, and utterly, catastrophically ordinary. He loves her completely and expresses it in the least cinematic ways imaginable. Emma, who expected marriage to feel like her novels, finds that it feels like... Tuesday. Repeatedly.

She eventually has a daughter she feels little connection to — a detail Flaubert drops without drama, because he’s Flaubert and he doesn’t flinch. She takes lovers. She accumulates debts funding a lifestyle worthy of her fantasies. It ends badly. Very badly. This is 19th century French literature, not a Netflix special.

Now here is where Flaubert gets interesting.

He wasn’t writing a feminist manifesto. He wasn’t writing a condemnation of marriage, or of Charles, or of provincial French life. He was writing about something older and more universal: the danger of fiction.

A century before Bovary, Cervantes had already made the same diagnosis with Don Quixote — a man so saturated with chivalric romances that he could no longer distinguish a giant from a windmill. The mechanism is identical. Consume enough of a particular fantasy, and reality starts to look like a malfunction.

Flaubert just made his protagonist a woman, which made 19th century readers considerably more uncomfortable. A man tilting at windmills is absurd and comic. A woman wanting more than her life offers is a problem to be managed.

The condition even has a name: bovarysme. The tendency to see yourself as you wish to be rather than as you are, and to measure your actual life against an imagined ideal. Coined by a philosopher shortly after the novel was published. It entered the dictionary. We then proceeded to build entire industries around it.

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Because here’s what Flaubert could not have anticipated: the romantic novel didn’t die. It evolved. Grew. Put on better cover art and figured out the algorithm.

The billionaire with the emotional range of a filing cabinet but the body of a Greek statue. The meet-cute that blossoms, without challenges or bad timing or the horrible intimacy of seeing someone eat soup for the first time, into something transcendent. The hero who knows exactly what to say, and says it at the exact right moment, usually at the airport. The ending that arrives like a perfectly timed punchline — not because the characters worked for it, but because the plot needed it to happen by chapter twenty-eight.

This isn’t a screed against romance. But I do think we underestimate how much this stuff gets into us. Into how we assess our partners. Our relationships. That quiet, faintly embarrassing feeling that your life should have more score behind it. That if he didn’t plan something extraordinary for your anniversary, maybe the feeling just isn’t there. That passion and longevity are supposed to somehow coexist indefinitely, because they do in every book you’ve ever read, so why not in your living room?

Important caveat: Emma’s social constraints were real — suffocating, by our standards — and the fact that her own story is named after her husband’s surname is no coincidence. But Emma also makes choices. Destructive ones, repeatedly. She is complicit in her own undoing. Flaubert was too honest a writer to let her off entirely, and too humane a one to condemn her entirely either.

Charles Bovary was, by any objective measure, a good man. Kind. Loyal. Genuinely in love with his wife until the end — past the end, actually, which is gutting if you think about it too long. In another story, he’s the reward. In Emma’s head, shaped by everything she’d ever read, he was the consolation prize.

That is the tragedy. Not that she wanted more. Wanting more is human and legitimate and, frankly, often correct. The tragedy is that she couldn’t see what she actually had, because she was too busy measuring it against something that was never real to begin with.

The question the book keeps asking, 170 years later, is simply this: do you know the difference between what you want and what you’ve been sold?

Not an easy question. The selling is very good now. Better than Flaubert could have imagined. It has a recommendation engine.

But the first step, probably, is taking an honest look at what you consume and ask yourself how realistic it is. And being honest about the answer.

Charles was fine, you know. Charles was genuinely fine.

You probably remember it, or at least the vibe of it — men in suits looking panicked on TV, banks collapsing, governments scrambling to throw money at the problem. Trillions, collectively, to bail out the institutions that had caused the mess in the first place.

It was a bit like watching someone burn your house down and then fundraising for their therapy.

While all of this was happening, Finland looked at the situation, looked at its 20,000 homeless people, and made a decision that was so sensible it bordered on radical:

What if we just... housed them?

The program is called Housing First, and it does exactly what it says. You give homeless people homes. Not shelters with seventeen conditions attached. Not “prove you’re employable, prove you’re sober, prove you deserve this.” Just — a home. First. Unconditionally.

The logic being that it’s quite difficult to sort your life out when you don’t have a roof over your head.

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I know. Staggering stuff.

Here’s the part that gets me: this wasn’t some bleeding-heart left-wing revolution. The minister who championed it was centre-right. Because it turns out, letting people sleep on the street is actually quite expensive — emergency services, hospitals, policing. Housing people costs less.

So Finland did the compassionate thing, and it happened to also be the economical thing, and somehow this combination of decency and common sense remains the most underrated plot twist in modern European governance.

The result? Finland is now the only country in Europe where homelessness is down. Everywhere else, it’s gone up — 70% across the continent in the last decade. On any given night, 700,000 people sleep rough across Europe, all while nearly 40 million houses sit empty.

Finland decided things could be different.

Do you see the pattern?

The Germans decided burnout deserved a spa prescription before you started trying to decapitate colleagues with your keyboard. The Norwegians decided you’re allowed to walk through a forest without filing a request in triplicate. The Swedes decided a biscuit and fifteen minutes of human conversation are, in fact, a non-negotiable part of the workday.

And the Finns decided that in a wealthy country, nobody should sleep outside.

Not revolutionary. Just — a choice. The kind that requires deciding, first, that people matter more than the optics of fiscal conservatism.

While the rest of the world was writing cheques to banks, Finland was quietly writing a different kind of policy. The kind where the person on the street is the one who gets the cheque.

As Aristotle said: you are what you do repeatedly.
So what do our choices say — about who we are, and what we’ve decided is normal?

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Inspired by the excellent Who Does It Best?–Housing episode on the excellent The Europeans podcast. I highly recommend listening, but if you prefer to read their excellent work, you can find them here on Substack at . Did I mention they’re excellent?

A personal note

The shrewdest among you might have noticed this Substack has a new name. Love, European Style is nowThe Real Thing.

Here’s why: I kept sitting down to write about romance and ending up writing about things like the Finnish housing policy. Which told me something.

The thread running through everything I actually want to write about isn’t Europe, exactly, or love, exactly — it’s the gap between what we’re sold and how things really are. The difference between the brochure and the place. The relationship you were promised versus the one you’re actually in.

Somewhat against the job description for a romance writer, I know. But I’d like to make the case that these two things aren’t mutually exclusive. You can love without idealising. Live without bullshit. And find genuine inspiration in places that get things right, without pretending they get everything right.

The Real Thing, in other words.

If you’d like to know more about the change — including my entirely calm and not at all emotionally charged thoughts on the romance industry — you can read Why I Started The Real Thing (Or: My Grievances With the Romance Industry, Presented With Love).

If you have a friend, colleague, family member, gym buddy, ex you're still on good terms with, dentist, or that one person who always sends you interesting articles at 11pm who might enjoy what I write, please forward this email or click the share button. It helps more than you'd think.

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If something continues, it’s because you are actively allowing it. If it ends, it’s because you ended it. This is not romance. This is logistics.

In your twenties, love felt like an external force. Things happened. You fell. You were swept. You were blindsided. Responsibility was optional, because everything could be blamed on timing, chemistry, or the general confusion of being alive and not knowing what capital gains tax is.

After 30, this excuse quietly expires.

Nothing is accidental anymore.

You don’t “end up” in relationships. You enter them. You stay in them. You renew them, or you don’t. Even inertia becomes a decision, which is deeply unfair — because sometimes you would like to do absolutely nothing and still be considered innocent. Courts don’t allow this. Neither does your therapist. Neither does love, it turns out.

Commitment, at this stage, stops being about grand gestures and becomes about exclusion. Saying yes to one person means saying no to several hypothetical lives. Other cities. Other lovers. Other versions of yourself that remain permanently untested. This is the part no one romanticizes, because it’s hard to sell longing for things you deliberately let go of. There’s no market for I Could Have Lived in Lisbon But Here We Are.

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And yet, choosing is where love finally lives.

Not in potential — in repetition. In waking up and deciding, again, that this is the life you are participating in. Which sounds small until you realize how many people spend years doing elaborate emotional gymnastics specifically to avoid exactly that clarity.

Breakups after 30 reflect this shift. They are often calm, respectful, devastating in a very organized way. No screaming. No begging. Just two adults acknowledging that continuing would require a kind of effort neither wants to make — like a gym membership you both keep paying for and no one uses. You don’t leave because love is gone. You leave because it isn’t enough to justify the maintenance.

This is maturity, apparently.

The strange thing is that maturity doesn’t make love safer. It makes it more exposed. There’s no fantasy to hide behind. No narrative to blame. No mercury retrograde to pin it on, though God knows we’ve all tried.

If you stay, it’s because you want to. If you leave, it’s because you chose yourself, or peace, or a future that felt more honest.

Love after 30 doesn’t promise permanence. It offers agency.

And that’s the trade. You lose the drama of being overtaken. You lose the illusion that love will solve your life for you. What you gain is something quieter and more unsettling: the knowledge that love is something you build or dismantle with your own hands.

Every day.

Which sounds exhausting. And sometimes — let’s be honest — it absolutely is.

But it’s also the first time love stops happening to you and starts happening with you.

And that, whether or not it comes with fireworks or a man in the rain with a pension plan, is finally real.

Like that quiet, slightly embarrassing feeling that you’re somehow doing it wrong. That your relationship should have more passion. That if your boyfriend didn’t propose on a rooftop in Paris, maybe he doesn’t love you enough. That choosing not to have kids — or having them and finding it hard — means you’ve failed. That people married for decades are having acrobatic sex on a daily basis, but for some reason you aren’t.

You didn’t fail. You just got sold a very specific story about what a good life looks like. And it turns out that story is, to put it diplomatically, bullshit.

Love, like life, takes many forms. But one thing’s for certain: it is never as easy, as neat, or as well-soundtracked as the genre would have you believe.

It’s a fantasy, I hear the die-hard among you you say, it’s meant to be unrealistic. And yet, I believe the fantasies we buy into affect us more than we know.

Here’s my honest position: I love love. Genuinely, without irony. I believe in it completely. I just think the version we’ve been sold — the billionaire who’s emotionally stunted but very good with helicopters, the instalove, the endings that arrive like a pizza delivery, right on time and requiring no effort from anyone — is too small, too neat, and too fake. It sets an impossible standard and then quietly makes us feel like we fell short of it.

So this is where I write about the real thing instead. Love as it actually works — slower, funnier, more uncertain, and ultimately more fascinating than anything you’ve read in a paperback with a semi-nude man on the cover. Essays on what love and the good life actually look like. Made in Europe, because when it comes to living well, Europe tends to get a surprising amount of it right.

Three times a month. No morning routines. No affiliate links. No helicopters.

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Do subscribe. It’s gonna be fun.

And if you’ve been here a little longer, you’ll know I have a standing problem with borderline-criminal behavior being packaged as romance. I even have a test for it. The Gollum Test: if it only reads as romantic because the man doing it is attractive, it isn’t romance. It’s just a restraining order in a waistcoat.

But I don’t want to be the cranky cat lady who shakes her first at others in perpetual discontent. Anyone can point at the bad example. I want to talk about who got it right.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far to do that. Same year. Same family. Different sister. I am talking, of course, about Jane Eyre.

Charlotte Brontë’s novel is equal parts romance and bildungsroman — a coming-of-age story, for the non-Germans among us — with a gothic sprinkle on top, because 1847. Her protagonist is, from page one, fiery, passionate, and headstrong, with a solid sense of self and a thirst for justice. She is, frankly, a badass. Her arc is one of growth and resilience through absolute misery in a very, very male world — and she does come out on top. Just not the way you’d expect.

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(SPOILERS) On the surface, it’s Cinderella 101: poor plain girl gets the prince cum mansion in the end. But look closer. One: she’s not rescued by him — in fact, she’s the one who does the rescuing, and is not afraid to leave when his morals turn out to be, er, debatable. Two: she marries him only once she’s become his equal via a handy inheritance, and he’s been taken down a notch or three. Three: the prince is charismatic as hell but described as flat-out ugly on multiple occasions. Because our gal ain’t shallow.

So why is this a great love story? The key word is boundaries. I know — not sexy. But bear with me.

Jane loves Rochester with full knowledge of his flaws, and there are many. She sees him clearly and loves him anyway. But she will not disappear into him or for him. Hence her famous line: “I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.”

She will follow him, she says — in all that is right. Not unconditionally. Within her values, on her terms.

Wuthering Heights, by contrast, is where boundaries go to die. Catherine famously says “I am Heathcliff.” Heathcliff, after her death, cries “I cannot live without my life.” Their love is a black hole, a huge dark nothingness that destroys them and everything around them — as the novel’s architecture makes clear, because nobody, and I mean nobody, ends well.

Incidentally, Heathcliff fails the Gollum Test. Spectacularly. Yes, Rochester flirts with a woman he has no intention of marrying, just to see if Jane is reciprocating his feelings. Not ideal, I’ll grant you. But Heathcliff? He does marry a woman to spite Cathrine, and hangs his poor bride’s dog for good measure. Let me say that again: he hangs her dog.

Why we decided that’s romantic is genuinely beyond me.

To be clear, this is not a flaw in the novel. It is the novel’s argument. Emily Brontë was not writing a love story. She was writing a case study in what happens when two people with no sense of self decide that the solution is to become one person.

The novel’s genuine psychological insight — and it is a dark one — is that what Heathcliff calls love is not distinguishable from hate.

Jane Eyre understood something Wuthering Heights spends four hundred pages proving by catastrophic counterexample: love without a self isn’t love.

That word is fika.

In Swedish: a coffee break with something sweet. Sacred, non-negotiable, institutionalised.

In Italian: well. Let’s just say fica is a word your grandmother would wash your mouth out for, and leave it there.

But here’s the thing. The Italians are wrong to laugh. Because fika — properly understood — is one of the most quietly radical ideas in modern working life.

Let me tell you what a coffee break looks like in most of the world.

You’ve got twelve minutes before your next meeting. You shuffle to the machine in the corner — the one that’s been making a suspicious noise since 2019 — and you extract something brown and hot into a plastic cup. You drink it standing up, possibly while checking your phone, definitely while thinking about the twelve minutes. Then you go back.

That’s not a break. That’s a reboot. A human Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

Fika is something else entirely.

In Sweden, fika happens at a set time — usually mid-morning, sometimes mid-afternoon — and it lasts fifteen to twenty minutes. Some offices have a dedicated fika room. Some have a kitchenette and a rotation system: one person brings the coffee, another brings the baked goods, and this rotation goes from intern to CEO without exception or ceremony. Nobody is above the cinnamon roll.

It’s short. It’s regular. It’s accompanied by something that qualifies as a treat.

And — crucially — it’s together.

Not “grab a coffee whenever.” Not “take a personal wellness moment.” Together. At the table. Talking about something that has nothing to do with Q3 targets.

The Germans prescribe spa retreats before burnout. The Norwegians say you’re allowed to exist in nature without asking anyone’s permission. The Spanish throw a street party in a parking lot and call it community. And the Swedes? The Swedes look at the workday and say: twice a day, we stop. We sit. We eat something nice.

You see the pattern.

What fika understands — what all these things understand — is that productivity is not the natural state of a human being. Rest is not laziness dressed up in a dressing gown. And the conversation you have over a cardamom bun about your colleague’s terrible weekend holiday is not wasted time.

It is, in fact, the whole point.

There’s research behind this, if you need the permission of data. Short social breaks improve focus, reduce stress, increase team cohesion. But honestly, you don’t need a study. You just need to ask yourself when you last sat down with the people you work with and talked about nothing important for fifteen minutes.

If the answer is “I can’t remember,” Sweden would like a word.

I’ve been thinking about why these European rituals keep surprising people — why the Kur feels radical, why allemannsretten feels almost utopian, why fika sounds like a luxury when it’s actually just a cup of coffee and a biscuit.

I think it’s because somewhere along the way, we internalised the idea that comfort is something you earn. That rest is a reward for sufficient suffering. That the cinnamon roll comes after you’ve proved yourself.

Fika disagrees. Politely. With excellent pastry.

It says: you are a person first. The work is secondary.

Sit down.

You know what you want now. You want calm. Consistency. Someone who can regulate their emotions and doesn’t think disappearing is a communication style. You want adult love.

And yet.

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You still might find yourself wildly attracted to someone who replies sporadically, avoids eye contact during serious conversations, and says things like “I’m just seeing where life takes me.” Life, incidentally, keeps taking them away from you.

This creates a fascinating split within the self. One part of you is evolved, reasonable, and would like a nice evening routine. Another part is a raccoon. The raccoon wants intensity. The raccoon wants to feel something. The raccoon has never read a book about attachment theory and resents the implication that it should.

In your twenties, this kind of desire felt inevitable. After 30, it feels irritating. You can see exactly what’s happening in real time. You’re watching yourself be attracted to a known liability, like a very slow-motion car crash with good cheekbones.

The cruel joke is that desire doesn’t weaken with age—it just becomes more inconvenient. It shows up after you’ve done the work. After you’ve healed. After you’ve sworn you’re done with emotionally unavailable people and meant it sincerely at the time.

What does change after 30 is that you don’t romanticize this anymore. You don’t call it fate.

You call it a pattern and sigh deeply. You may still engage, but you do so with eyes open, which removes most of the poetry and adds a mild sense of shame.

This is progress.

Because the real shift isn’t that you stop wanting the wrong thing. It’s that you stop building an identity around it. You don’t confuse attraction with destiny. You don’t redesign your life around a feeling that hasn’t passed a background check.

You can want someone and still say no.

This is new.

Desire after 30 doesn’t disappear. It just loses authority. It becomes a voice, not a verdict. Something to be acknowledged, not obeyed. Something you can laugh at while it’s trying to ruin your peace.

Which is not as thrilling as being swept away.

But it does mean that, for the first time, wanting someone doesn’t automatically cost you yourself.

The “vibe” of the film is captured in the opening minutes, before you even see anything, as the title credits roll. You hear a man grunting—louder and louder—accompanied by the rhythmic creaking sound that inevitably makes you think of a bed. Someone’s getting naughty, you think, bracing yourself for a Georgian sex scene where the man’s about to climax and the woman’s just… taking it. Because we hear no female sounds.

And yet.

What we see is a man being hanged. He takes a very long time to die and, true to grim biological reality, gets the proverbial hard-on in the process.

“Oh, I get it,” you think. “Sex and death. Eros and Thanatos. Very clever.”

And that’s kind of how the entire film continues.

The symbolism is heavy-handed in a way that makes you feel like you’re being lectured by a particularly earnest film student. Cathy is always wearing red—the color of passion, naturally, in case you missed it the first seventeen times. All sensual aspects are drawn attention to with the subtlety of a fire alarm: the wind, the rain (which, to be fair, are also prominent in the novel), but also blood, snails, a fish (?), mud, more blood. At one point I half-expected someone to start eating a pomegranate just to really hammer the point home.

One thing I genuinely appreciated: the film does not romanticize the setting. Contrary to many Jane Austen adaptations where everyone’s hair looks suspiciously clean, here you are constantly reminded of the dirt, the cold, the poverty, and the utter misery of life in the past—unless you were rich, of course, in which case your misery was at least well-upholstered.

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Let’s talk about the rich.

The production design for the wealthy characters is so over-the-top it feels like something out of a Lady Gaga music video. The Linton house looks like a literal dollhouse—all shiny surfaces and mannered postures—emphasizing, I suppose, the performativity of the upper class. It’s a choice reminiscent of the 2012 Anna Karenina adaptation, which was literally set on a theatre stage. Daring? Sure. Effective? Debatable.

Here’s the trailer in case you missed it.

The problem is this: the film becomes an intellectual viewing experience rather than an emotional one. As in the novel, neither of the main characters is particularly nice. But the director found a way to villainize even the people who were decent in the book—Nelly the housekeeper and Cathy’s father both come off worse here, which is quite a feat. So what you’re left with is a visually striking exploration of, I guess, the addictive nature of lust. Not love. Lust, as proven by the endless finger licking and tongue sucking.

Interestingly, there are references to Romeo and Juliet that are not present in the original novel—introduced, I suspect, to suggest that these two unhappy lovers are victims of circumstance rather than their own spectacularly poor communication skills.

But are they?

Could Heathcliff and Cathy have been happy if everything had gone well and they’d married in abject poverty? I personally doubt it. I envision a future of domestic abuse, financial ruin, and the kind of misery that makes for a very depressing existence.

So why make it all destiny’s fault?

Perhaps, as others have suggested, this film is meant to capture the look of romance as a genre—romance as an ideal, all shiny colors and dramatic declarations. It’s the kind of thing you might fall for as a teenager, ascribing all problems to external forces like fate or society or the stars. But to the more mature observer, it can’t help but come across as a bit… shallow. Performative, even. Like watching people make silly decisions in slow motion while a very expensive camera captures every drop of bodily fluid involved.

In fact, I was rooting for Edgar the entire time. The only sane character in this film, if you ask me. Loving, patient, not even judgmental despite ample cause—and yet not a doormat either. He’s the adult in a movie full of children throwing tantrums in beautiful costumes.

The film is visually stunning. The performances are committed. The direction is bold. But at the end of the day, I walked out thinking less about doomed love and more about how exhausting it must be to live your entire life at emotional eleven.

Maybe that’s the point.

Or maybe I’m just too old for this kind of romance.

My plan—if you can call it that—was simple. I’d get close. Have a look around. Maybe knock.

In Europe, this is how things go. The worst that happens is someone asks you to leave. Maybe you exchange a few polite words. Maybe, if you’re lucky, they let you have a peek. I once tracked Roger Federer to a hotel in Rome and came away with a photo and an autograph—but that’s a story for another time.

In California, I stopped at the no-trespassing sign.

Not because I’m particularly law-abiding, but because something in the air reminded me: this is a country where people own guns. And mean it. Private property here is not a suggestion. It’s a philosophical position, possibly a loaded one.

I picked up a small stone from the ground and left. That was my souvenir.

My brother wasn’t impressed, but he appreciated the gesture.

Back in Europe, I wouldn’t have felt that flicker of fear. And the reason has a name that sounds like a spell from a Viking musical.

Allemannsretten. Everyman’s right.

It’s a Norwegian concept so old nobody quite knows when it started—only that by the time someone thought to write it down, in 1957, it had already been the natural order of things for centuries. Before roads, before cars, before Google Maps, Norwegians crossed each other’s land because that was simply how you got anywhere. The idea that someone might own a forest in a way that excluded other people from it would have seemed not just unusual, but faintly unhinged.

What it means in practice is this: you can walk, cycle, ski, camp, swim, or pick berries on any uncultivated land in Norway—forests, mountains, coastline—regardless of who owns it. You can pitch a tent on private land for the night, as long as you stay away from any buildings and leave no trace. You are allowed to exist in nature without asking anyone’s permission.

The rule isn’t “stay out.”
It’s “just don’t be a d*ick.”

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Norway isn’t alone in this. Scotland has its own version. So do Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic—variations on the same idea: that nature is not a commodity. That a forest doesn’t fully belong to whoever bought it. That you are allowed to move through the world without paying someone for the privilege of being in it.

It’s the same thread I pulled on in the botellón piece—the Spanish street party that’s technically illegal but universally tolerated, the Barcelona superblocks that handed the streets back to people. Europe keeps returning to the same question: who does this space belong to?

And keeps arriving at the same answer.

Last autumn, a dear friend and I drove deep into the Swedish countryside to go mushroom picking. Her boss, an avid mushroom hunter with strong opinions, had shared a location he considered foolproof. The pin sat squarely in the middle of nowhere, which in Sweden is saying something. We parked, we wandered, we filled our basket. On the way back, we discovered our car was technically locked in—because, yes, some of the land was private.

This was resolved by knocking on a door and having a perfectly pleasant conversation with the people who lived there.

The worst that happened was… a chat.

Those mushrooms, by the way, were the best I’ve ever tasted. I don’t know if that’s because Swedish forests produce extraordinary chanterelles, or because there’s something about walking freely—without anxiety, without the low hum of am I allowed to be here?—that makes everything taste better.

Probably both.

Any similar experiences? I’m curious. Tell me in the comments.

For most of our lives, love was sold to us as an event. Something that happens to you. Preferably suddenly, preferably against your will, preferably accompanied by a soundtrack. Love was passion, intensity, longing. Love was losing sleep and pretending you didn’t need to eat. Love was mistaking anxiety for depth and confusion for mystery.

And then you turn 30, and no one hands you the updated manual.

Instead, you notice small, unsexy shifts. You meet someone interesting and think, Yes, but how do they handle conflict? You feel chemistry and immediately wonder if it’s trauma-based. You start valuing calm, which is deeply inconvenient because calm has terrible PR. No one ever wrote a poem about a man who owns a functional vacuum cleaner and uses it. No one wrote a ballad about emotional availability. There’s no movie called He Remembered I Was Lactose Intolerant.

The myth doesn’t collapse all at once. It erodes. You see friends fall in and out of love with increasing efficiency. Breakups become quieter, more polite, almost administrative—you start ending relationships the way you’d cancel a gym membership.

“It’s not working” replaces “I can’t live without you,” which is progress, but emotionally less cinematic. Even your own heartbreaks start arriving with bullet points and conclusions. Like a very sad PowerPoint presentation.

What no one tells you is that love after 30 isn’t worse. It’s just less symbolic. It stops standing in for everything else.

In your twenties, love was identity. It answered questions you didn’t know how to ask: Who am I? Am I desirable? Am I chosen? Love was proof of worth. After 30, love loses that job. You already know who you are, roughly. You’ve been chosen and unchosen enough times to stop treating it as a verdict. Love becomes smaller, more specific—and therefore more real.

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You’re not less romantic; you’re just less willing to confuse intensity with meaning. You’ve learned that longing can exist without compatibility, and that desire does not automatically imply safety. You’ve learned that wanting someone very badly does not mean wanting the life that comes with them. You've learned, in short, that the butterflies in your stomach might just be a passing feeling—and not necessarily a grand sign about your destiny.

There’s a quiet relief in this, even if it doesn’t photograph well.

Losing the myth of love doesn’t mean losing love. It means losing the fantasy version that required you to disappear inside it. What replaces it isn’t fireworks, but orientation. A sense of direction. A calmer question: Does this make my life better?

Which is not a very romantic question. But it is a surprisingly loving one.

And maybe that’s the first real shift after 30: love stops being something you fall into, and starts being something you can actually stand in, without losing your balance.

And we swoon. We dog-ear the page. We think, “God, that’s so romantic.”

Now imagine Gollum doing it.

Still romantic? Or are you calling the police and investing in better locks?

This is what I call the Gollum Test, and it’s my benchmark for whether something is actually romantic or just tolerated harassment because the guy in question has cheekbones that could cut glass. If a gesture only works when performed by someone who looks like they wandered off a Calvin Klein billboard, it’s not romance. It’s just us making excuses for bad behavior because we’re attracted to the person doing it.

Think about actual romantic gestures. Flowers. A handwritten note. A surprise candlelit dinner. These work regardless of who’s doing them. If Gollum brought you flowers, you’d probably still think it was sweet—weird, sure, but sweet. You might not marry him, but you’d acknowledge the effort. That’s because these gestures respect boundaries while expressing affection. They don’t require you to ignore red flags the size of circus tents.

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But breaking into somebody’s house to watch them sleep? Showing up uninvited after they’ve said no? Getting jealous and possessive and calling it “passion”? Physically cornering someone until they agree to a date, a kiss, a relationship, sex? These only get filed under “romance” if the person doing them has glistening abs and a jawline that makes you forget what consent means.

Of course it feels good to be wanted. There’s something intoxicating about the fantasy of someone desiring you so intensely they lose all sense of appropriate behavior. I get it. I write romance. But here’s the problem—desire doesn’t equal entitlement. Wanting someone badly doesn’t give you the right to ignore their boundaries, and yet we’ve built an entire genre that all to often pretends it does.

The romance industry has spent decades selling us the idea that if a man is hot enough, stalking becomes devotion. Controlling becomes caring. Ignoring “no” becomes persistence. And we’ve bought it so thoroughly that we’ve stopped noticing we’re romanticizing the exact behaviors that, in real life, are precursors to violence against women.

Because here’s the thing: abuse doesn’t announce itself. It starts small. It starts with jealousy framed as protectiveness. With showing up uninvited framed as spontaneity. With ignoring boundaries framed as passion. And if we’re training ourselves to find these things romantic in fiction—if we’re teaching young readers that love looks like someone who won’t take no for an answer—we’re doing real damage.

So here’s my proposal: before you swoon over a romantic gesture in a book (or real life), run it through the Gollum Test. If it only works because the guy is hot, it’s not romantic.

It’s just a restraining order waiting to happen.

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It was glorious.The city was our living room for a few hours. No bouncers, no cover charge, no overpriced cocktails with names that sound like sex acts you need a manual for.

I thought it was an Italian thing—you know, like tax evasion and arguing about pasta. Turns out, it was imported from Spain.

It’s called botellón—literally “big bottle,” because Spanish is hilariously literal sometimes—and it’s Spain’s accidental genius for solving the problem of being young, broke, and thirsty for fun and, obviously, booze. The concept is revolutionary in its simplicity: buy your drinks at the supermarket for next to nothing and claim a public space to a party.

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Is it legal? Technically, no. Most cities have ordinances against it. Does anyone care? Also no. It’s tolerated the way weed is in Amsterdam—technically prohibited, practically ignored, and understood to be solving more problems than it creates. Police will show up if you’re being a complete disaster, but otherwise they’ve got better things to do than arrest 200 university students for the crime of drinking Mahou on a bench. That’s because Spain understands something too many other countries forgot: cities belong to people, not business. And sometimes the law needs to take a nap while common sense does the work.

Barcelona took this principle and turned it into actual policy. The superblock system—superilles, if you want to sound fancy at dinner parties—literally redesigned entire streets to prioritize people over cars. Whole neighborhoods got converted into pedestrian zones where kids play football, old men argue over dominoes with the intensity of nuclear negotiations, and yes, students drink Estrella Damm on benches like it’s a constitutional right.

It’s not about traffic flow. It’s about admitting that maybe, just maybe, humans are more important than Seta Ibizas.

Contrast that with most other places, where public space is either privatized or policed into joyless submission. In the US, you can’t drink outside unless it’s inside a carefully designated “beer garden” that costs more than your student loan payment. Sit anywhere too long without buying something and security will materialize like you’ve triggered some sort of capitalism alarm. The message is clear: if you’re not spending money, you’re loitering. And loitering is for criminals and pigeons.

Spain said joder, no. Public space is public. The mess—and yes, there’s mess, let’s not romanticize the morning-after bottle graveyards—is the price of freedom. It’s a price Spanish cities seem willing to pay, because the alternative is worse: sterile plazas where nobody gathers, streets designed for cars that hate you, young people with nowhere to go but expensive bars where a gin and tonic costs more than a kidney on the black market.

Botellón is dying out in some places now—gentrification, noise complaints, the usual killjoys—but what it represents still matters. It is a reminder that cities are living organisms, not open-air malls. That sometimes the best urban planning is admitting you have no idea what you’re doing and just letting people figure it out themselves.

I haven’t been to one in years. But I miss those Milan nights—the cheap beer named “beer” sold at Lidl (I kid you not), the terrible guitar covers of Wonderwall, the strangers who became friends because you were all sitting on the same cold stone bench wondering if this was what freedom felt like.

It wasn’t sophisticated. It definitely wasn’t Instagram-worthy. Someone always threw up in a fountain.

But it was ours.

If your thing is feet, leather, or dressing up as a Power Ranger—godspeed. You do you. I support it.

But there are limits.

And one of those limits is mucus.

Like others in this series, this story isn’t mine—it belongs to my friend Emma (not her real name, because she’d murder me). But I have her written permission to share it, mostly because she’s processed the trauma and now finds it darkly hilarious.

So.

Emma had been seeing this guy—let’s call him Tom—for about six weeks. Nice enough. Good job. Decent conversationalist. No obvious red flags, which in modern dating is basically equivalent to finding a unicorn.

Things were progressing. They’d done the dinners, the walks, the “let me show you this obscure playlist” phase. And then, naturally, they arrived at the sleepover stage.

Everything was fine. Normal. Pleasant, even.

And then Emma’s nose started running.

Nothing dramatic—just a little sniffle. Seasonal allergies. The kind of thing you dab with a tissue and move on from.

Except Tom did not move on.

Tom leaned in.

And licked it.

Let me repeat that, in case your brain did what Emma’s brain did and simply refused to process the information:

He. Licked. Her. Snot.

Not a playful peck. Not a weird joke.

A full, deliberate, tongue-out lick. Like a cat grooming a kitten. Except the kitten was a grown woman with a runny nose and the cat was a man who had clearly been waiting for this exact moment.

Emma froze.

You know that thing where your brain short-circuits and you’re just... buffering? That was her. She didn’t scream. She didn’t move. She just sat there, paralyzed, while her mind tried to reconcile what had just happened with the laws of physics and human decency.

Finally, she managed: “What... what are you doing?”

Tom smiled. Not sheepish. Not embarrassed.

Pleased.

“I like it,” he said, as if this explained everything.

“You... like it?”

“Yeah.” He leaned in again. “It’s kind of my thing.”

Now, look. I’m not going to sit here and shame someone’s kink. But there are two problems with this scenario:

1. Consent is a thing. You don’t just spring a fetish on someone mid-intimacy without a heads-up. That’s not sexy spontaneity—that’s ambush.

2. Mucus.

I cannot stress this enough: mucus.

Emma, to her credit, did not immediately flee into the night.

She asked questions. Because she’s a journalist and also possibly she was in shock.

Turns out, Tom had a whole thing about runny noses. He’d been hoping she’d get a cold. He had, in fact, been mildly disappointed during the previous weeks when her sinuses remained clear.

He explained this as if it were charming.

Emma, very calmly, got dressed.

“I think I should go,” she said.

“Already?” Tom looked genuinely confused. “But you’re still—”

“Yep. Still going.”

She left.

Washed her face seventeen times.

And now, whenever she has a cold, she thinks of Tom.

Which is, honestly, the worst part.

The moral of the story:

Everyone’s got their thing. But if your thing involves another person’s bodily fluids, maybe—just maybe—lead with that in conversation before you deploy your tongue.

Consent: it’s not just for the fun stuff. It’s for all the stuff.

And Emma? She’s doing great. She’s dating someone new.

Someone who, when she sniffles, hands her a tissue.

Like a normal human being.

Stop.

I’m going to save you from yourself.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think a book is always a good gift. It says “I thought about you” without the commitment of something they have to display on their mantle forever. It’s personal without being weird. And unlike scented candles or that gadget from TikTok, a good book actually gets used.

Lucky for you, I’ve spent years reading everything from Victorian gothic doorstoppers to contemporary romance to existential Russian literature (I’m fun at parties, I swear), and I’m here to match the right book to the people in your life you will absolutely shop for earlier next year.

Whether you’re shopping for your chronically anxious friend, your pretentious cousin, or that person who claims they “don’t have time to read” (yet somehow watched all of The Crown in three days), I’ve got you.

Let’s do this.

1. The Overthinker

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

Your friend who turns a simple “should we get pizza?” into a 20-minute philosophical debate about late-stage capitalism and gluten. They need DFW’s essay collection like they need oxygen—it’s neurotic brilliance in book form, someone (finally!) putting into words why a Caribbean cruise is actually an existential nightmare. They’ll read one essay and text you at 2am with thoughts. You’re welcome.

2. The Hopeless Romantic

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

For the person who still believes in love despite all evidence to the contrary (their dating history, the news, reality TV). This one’s got banter, an enemies-to-lovers dynamic, and a meta-awareness about romance tropes that makes it feel smart while still delivering all the butterflies. It’s like if someone made a romantic comedy but remembered that women have personalities and career ambitions. Revolutionary, I know.

3. The Page-Turner Addict

One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus

The person who claims they “don’t really read” but binged Succession in four days. Hand them this. It’s The Breakfast Club meets murder mystery, and they’ll be so hooked they’ll forget to check their phone for three hours straight—which is basically a miracle in 2025. By page 50 they’ll be texting you theories. By page 200 they’ll have converted.

4. The Cerebral Type

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

Your friend who does the New York Times crossword in pen and gets genuinely offended by plot holes in Marvel movies. This is Agatha Christie meets Groundhog Day meets a Rubik’s cube made of murder. It’s the kind of book that makes you feel smart just for keeping track of what’s happening. They’ll be insufferably smug about figuring out the twist (they won’t figure it out).

5. The Pessimist/Realist

Stoner by John Williams

For the friend who responds to “how are you?” with “well, we’re all going to die eventually.” This is the story of a man who lives a quiet, unremarkable life and somehow it’s devastating and beautiful and weirdly life-affirming? It’s like the book version of sitting in a minor-key jazz club at 3am—melancholic but profound. They’ll love it because it confirms all their suspicions about existence while also making them feel deeply seen.

6. The Literary Snob

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

You know the one. They pronounce “croissant” with a French accent and have Opinions about book-to-film adaptations. Give them 600 pages of Victorian gothic mystery so they can casually drop “Oh, I’ve been rereading Wilkie Collins” at holiday parties. Here’s the secret: it’s actually an incredibly well-written page-turner, which they won’t admit makes them feel slightly less intellectual. Multiple narrators, well-developed characters, and one of the best villains in history all come together in a machiavellian inheritance plot—it’s Succession but with corsets.

7. The Person Stuck in a Rut

Yes Man by Danny Wallace

For whoever’s been saying “I should really...” for the past six months without actually doing anything. Most people don’t know the Jim Carrey movie came from this hilarious memoir about a guy who decided to say “yes” to everything for a year. It’s funny, it’s motivating without being preachy, and it might actually inspire them to finally sign up for that pottery class or whatever. Beware: they may become slightly more spontaneous. You’ve been warned.

8. The Cynic with Secret Feelings

Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler

The friend who makes fun of rom-coms but cried during Up. They act tough, they’ve got walls, they claim not to “do feelings.” Then you give them Barney Panofsky—a curmudgeonly, hilarious, deeply flawed narrator telling his life story—and suddenly they’re emotionally compromised. It’s extremely funny until it absolutely wrecks you, which is exactly what your cynic friend needs but would never admit to wanting.

9. The Wanderlust Romantic

Rome When It Rains by yours truly (coming Summer 2026!)

Okay, this one isn't a gift you can wrap and put under the tree—unless you're into giving people IOUs, which honestly feels like a cop-out. But if YOU loved this gift guide and want some witty, spicy, character-driven romance that takes place in Europe and ends in ways that surprise you, join the pre-order list here. You'll get early access before anyone else, plus exclusive bonus content when it launches. Think of it as a gift to Future You, who will be very grateful when summer 2026 rolls around and everyone's talking about it—as they most definitely will be.

There you have it: nine books, zero socks, and a significantly higher chance that your recipient will actually like what you got them.

And look—if all else fails and you’re still standing in a bookshop on Christmas Eve in a cold sweat, just remember: even a mediocre book is better than whatever panic-buy is currently calling to you from the gift section on Amazon. You’re giving someone permission to ignore their phone for a few hours. In 2025, that’s basically a spa day.

Now go forth and gift responsibly. Your recipients will thank you. Or at least they won’t regift it like they did with last year’s scented candle.

Happy holidays, and happy reading—to them, and to you if you’re smart enough to buy yourself something too.

If that isn’t the unofficial anthem of adulthood, I don’t know what is.

Enter Germany — the country that looked at the universal experience of burnout and said, essentially, “Sweetheart, have you tried… a spa?”

Not in a wellness-influencer, turmeric-latte, “identify your core wound” kind of way.
No.
In the insurance-covered, medically-prescribed, government-approved kind of way.

Welcome to the Kur.

A Kur is one of those charmingly efficient European inventions that sounds fake until you realise an entire bureaucracy exists to process it. If life has been difficult (and by difficult, I obviously mean “your boss discovered the CC button and won’t stop using it”), your doctor can prescribe you a therapeutic spa cure: baths, massages, mineral pools, physiotherapy, steam inhalations, and, I assume, long walks while contemplating whether capitalism was a mistake.

And the best part?
It’s not a luxury.
It’s policy.

The logic is beautifully sound: Why wait for someone to break completely when you can send them to a thermal bath before they smash their laptop against the nearest ergonomic chair?

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German public health insurance covers the medical treatment and even throws in a daily stipend for accommodation and meals. Meaning if you’re stressed, exhausted, or have become spiritually allergic to your inbox, you can legally disappear into the Black Forest and soak in mineral water for three weeks — and your employer has to accept your medical note.

Imagine explaining this to someone in the US.

“You’re burned out?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re taking time off?”
“Correct.”
“Is it unpaid?”
“No, it’s medically mandated.”
“Are you going to therapy?”
“No, I’m going to a spa.”
“…like… for fun?”
“No. For my health.”

At this point the American would short-circuit, possibly never to reboot again.

What I love about the Kur system is that it’s the perfect intersection of European practicality and quiet indulgence — the same cultural logic that gave us long lunches, Parisian bakeries, Italian aperitivo, and the Dutch approach to “look, if people are going to do it anyway, we might as well regulate it and tax it.”

It’s not even considered decadent. You tell someone in Germany you’re going on a Kur and they’ll react like you said you’re going to the dentist.

“Oh, a Kur? Nice. Bring slippers.”

There’s a tenderness to it, too — a sort of built-in recognition that people are human, not robots, and certainly not whatever your productivity app thinks you are. It’s an entire country saying, in its quiet, efficient way:

“You deserve to rest before things get dire.”

And honestly?
That might be the most romantic thing Europe has ever done — and this is a continent with Venice in it.

Things we could have done:
– Grab a poke bowl on the beach.
– Have a drink literally anywhere within a five-kilometer radius.
– Point at a random tapas bar.

What we did instead:
Kebab.

But wait. It gets worse.

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When I arrived, he was already waiting there. And before you ask — I was on time; he was early. The kind of early that comes with a side of passive-aggressive watch-checking.

He greeted me with a weird distance-hug, like the ghost of a very fat man was wedged between us.

I assumed the dingy corner kebab place was just the meeting point. You know, a casual “let’s meet here and then go somewhere nice.”

Nope.

He turned around and walked inside.

It wasn’t even a sit-down kebab — no plates, no chairs, not even cutlery. Just a counter, some mystery meat on a spit, and an unlabelled bottle of “white sauce” that probably violated several international treaties.

But hunger is an intoxicant. And I was in one of those moods where I thought, Maybe this is one of those hidden gem places? Maybe it’s delicious? Maybe I’m being a snob?

Spoiler: I was not being a snob.

He ordered immediately, with the urgency of someone emerging from a 40-day fast. Unsure what else to do, I ordered the same.

We sat on the curb outside, because apparently that’s where romance goes to die, and he inhaled his entire kebab in three bites.

I counted.

Then—because the universe has a sense of humor—he leaned toward me.

My first thought: Please don’t kiss me with a mouth full of kebab.

My second: Can this date get any worse?

It could!

“I’ve got something stuck in my teeth,” he said.

There are a lot of appropriate ways to follow up this statement.
“Go wash your mouth.”
“Use a napkin.”
“Why are you telling me this?”

What you do not do is what he did next.

He reached toward my head, took a lock of my hair — my actual hair — and wrapped it around his finger like he was about to propose, except instead of a ring he had a chunk of onion wedged between his molars…

…and he flossed.

With. My. Hair.

Time stopped. Birds paused mid-flight. The kebab guy inside probably felt a disturbance in the Force.

I didn’t react immediately because my brain was buffering. You know when your computer freezes and the little spinning wheel pops up? That was me. Just… waiting for the software update that would allow me to process the fact that this man had used my head as dental equipment.

Finally, words arrived.

“What—what are you doing?!” I sputtered, jerking away like I’d been electrocuted.

He blinked at me. Confused. As if I were the unreasonable one.

“Relax, it’s just hair,” he said.

“NOT FOR TEETH!“ I snapped. “Hair is not floss-adjacent! Hair is not a hygiene product! Hair is—oh my God, I can’t believe I have to explain this!”

He laughed.

A hearty, relaxed, post-kebab laugh. As if this were a meet-cute and not a biohazard.

“You’re overreacting,” he said, shrugging. “It’s not a big deal.”

Not. A. Big. Deal.

I stood up so fast I nearly launched myself into traffic. I told him this was insane, unacceptable, a crime against humanity—honestly, I don’t even remember exactly what I said because I was too busy trying not to set myself on fire to erase the memory.

He shrugged and went back to eating his fries.

Eating.

As if he hadn’t just performed the world’s most unhygienic magic trick.

I walked home with as much dignity as one can muster when one’s hair smells faintly of garlic sauce and semi-digested onion.

I washed it three times.

I considered cutting it off.

I considered cutting him into small pieces, Hannibal Lecter-style, but unfortunately the Geneva Convention has rules about that sort of thing.

The moral of the story?

Flossing is important.

Just not with someone else’s body parts.

And I won’t be going near a kebab—or that man—ever again.

A woman replied (I am paraphrasing):

“Women aren’t Pokémon to catch or rare animals to hunt. They’re people. With interests, jobs, thoughts of their own. As long as you get that, you don’t need to be good at ‘dating’. You just need to be good at interacting with a fellow human.”

And I thought — there it is. The missing line from every Hollywood script. Women aren’t Pokémon. But you wouldn’t know it from watching how we’re written.

Somewhere between damsel in distress and emotionally constipated assassin, women in fiction are rarely allowed to be people.

“Strong female character” may sound progressive, but it’s really just a new way to flatten women — same two dimensions, different pose. Where we once had baffled heroines asking “What do we do now?”, we now have superhuman badasses (still sexy, of course) mowing down enemies in leather pants.

Now we have the girl who never cries, never needs, never wavers. She’s competent, witty, and usually wearing something unreasonable in a gunfight. She has about the emotional range of the AK-47 she’s firing, but she can do a roundhouse kick, so—representation!

It’s not about giving women agency. It’s about giving audiences a performance of empowerment that still fits neatly inside the male fantasy. She’s powerful, but not threatening. Sexy, but not sexual. Independent, but never alone for too long (God forbid). It’s a new animal species for the man of the movie to tame.

Take Hermione Granger. Book Hermione is brilliant, bossy, infuriating, often right, occasionally unbearable. She’s human — gloriously so. Film Hermione? She’s perfect. Calm. Clever without the insecurity, brave without the nerves. A supermodel with a wand.

Somewhere between page and screen, she was airbrushed into the Strong Female Template™. Who, incredibly enough, somehow still ends up with Ron— despite him being turned into a complete idiot.

(All his good lines from the book were handed to her in the film. Maybe that’s the new male fantasy: even if you’re useless, even superwoman’s still in your league. Remember when Seth Rogen manages to bed Charlize Theron as the US President?)

But here’s the thing: real women don’t act like that. Real people don’t act like that.

We’re inconsistent. We cry in taxis. We rehearse entire confrontations in the shower and then say “no worries!” when the moment comes. We hold ourselves together at work and fall apart over a half-hearted emoji. We are tragic, comic, and often both.

That’s humanity for ya.

The problem with the “strong female character” isn’t the strength — it’s the character. She’s not written as a person. She’s a symbol, a marketing checkbox, a vehicle for a shallow idea of what “empowered” looks like.

Maybe that’s why shows like Fleabag hit a nerve. She’s not strong. She’s not weak. She’s a mess. She’s hilarious. She wants things that make no sense. She breaks her own heart. She’s not a symbol — she’s someone you might know, or have been.

Women aren’t strong or weak, clever or stupid, mothers or lovers.

They’re people. Just people.

Can we please start writing them as such.

Anyway.

The other night, while I was scrolling myself into oblivion, I watched this video called “A Chaotic Guide to Making Stuff Instead of Doomscrolling.”
A title which, to its credit, delivers exactly what it promises. It’s chaotic. It’s a guide. There’s definitely stuff.

At one point the guy mentions giving yourself a daily challenge. Nothing noble. Nothing that requires a TED Talk or a Himalayan retreat. Just… one little thing a day.

Apparently a guy in the UK has been doing a Rapvent — an advent calendar but with original raps. One song every day until Christmas. I don’t even have the energy to unbox my winter sweaters, and this man is out here releasing 24 micro-albums for fun.

So naturally I thought:
“Well, if he can do that… surely I can manage a paragraph.”

Which brings us here.

For the next 30 days, I’m writing one tiny lesson a day:
“30 Things My Cats Taught Me About Love.”

Because people love to romanticise dog love — that sweet, unconditional, slightly overenthusiastic adoration. And while dogs are perfect little angels, I refuse to base my relationship expectations on a creature who thinks I am divine simply because I opened a packet of chicken.

Cats, on the other hand?
Cats operate like seasoned diplomats.
Respect. Trust. Timing. Consistency.
They don’t worship you blindly. They don’t offer devotion “no matter what.”
You must earn their approval like a slightly underqualified intern hoping for a permanent contract.

So each day you’ll get one small, fur-coated truth about relationships.
Short, cheeky, a tiny bit existential.
A purr with a moral.

Really, this whole thing is just a creative warm-up for myself — a way to stop doomscrolling and start… scrollmaking? Scrollcreating? Whatever the opposite of doomscrolling is.
Showing up. Writing a thing. Not letting my brain dissolve into digital soup.

If you want to follow along, lovely.
If not, the cats and I will be over here, conducting our quiet little campaign for emotionally stable, well-boundaried love.

See you tomorrow for Day 1.

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