Monica has a theory about love: it starts electric and ends in watching Netflix in matching pyjamas. She’s seen the evidence. She’s lived it.

So when she moves to Rome, the last thing she’s looking for is a relationship. What she gets instead is Alexi: calm, confident, with an unparalleled lust for life. Their arrangement is simple — the summer, nothing more. No future. No expectations. No slow decay into domesticity.

It works. Then it starts to work too well.

What early readers said:

“It’s light-hearted yet deep, escapist yet relatable — and the sex scenes are never gratuitous, always perfectly woven into the story.”

“The characters are well developed, they feel real. Witty, funny, and fast-paced.”

“A hundred times better than the few other books I read in the genre.”

One more thing: if you buy before July 10, you also get a Movie Guide to Rome — written by yours truly. A way to experience central Rome at your own pace, through the lens of the films shot there: from Angels and Demons to Eat Pray Love, from Roman Holiday to Mission: Impossible. Instead of architectural details you’ll forget by the next day, I tell you about executions and papal raves, among other things. If you’re coming to Rome at any point soon, you’re in for a treat.

Buy the book, then visit averydwest.com to claim it.

BUY NOW AND GET A FREE MOVIE GUIDE

Ci vediamo a Roma.

What does it look like?

Let me guess: two people meet, fall in love, move in together. Probably get married. Maybe have children. Stay committed, grow old, and ideally arrive at ninety still quite fond of each other.

If that’s roughly what you pictured — congratulations. You have absorbed the Standard Model.

And so has every romance novel ever written.

Now. When did this particular arrangement become the One and Only way to love? Fairly recently, it turns out.

Take the engagement ring. In the 1930s, only 10% of engagement rings in the United States contained a diamond. By 1990, it was 80%. What happened between those two numbers? Some inexplicable spike in generosity (and wealth) on the part of men? No. A De Beers marketing campaign, launched in 1947, with the tagline “A Diamond is Forever.” That’s the sad truth behind the tradition. A seventy-five-year-old piece of advertising from a diamond cartel.

Does this mean you shouldn’t get an engagement ring? Absolutely not. Get whatever you want. But perhaps we could stop treating it like something handed down from the Holy Scriptures of Love rather than from an extraordinarily successful mining company.

The same logic applies to the whole package. For most of human history, marriage was very different from what it is today. It was mostly an economic arrangement — a merger of households, a transfer of property, a peace treaty between families. The wife managed the home, raised the children, kept things running. She was not expected to also be her husband’s best friend, his therapist, his own personal sexual goddess, and his primary source of emotional sustenance. That bundle hadn’t been invented yet.

In medieval Europe, the entire tradition of courtly love — the troubadours, the grand romantic gestures, the love poetry — was built explicitly around loving someone you couldn’t marry. Often someone else’s wife. Love and marriage were considered separate activities for separate occasions.

Men, meanwhile, were expected to stray. This was not considered a relationship failure. It was considered Tuesday.

(Women’s historical relationship with marriage has included the following highlights: being sold off before puberty; in parts of India, well into the twentieth century, being burned alive on their husband’s funeral pyre if he died first — technically banned in Bengal in 1829, practically banned in 1987; in England until 1882, watching everything they owned — property, wages, inheritance — transfer automatically to their husband the moment they said yes; in France until 1965, needing their husband’s written permission to open a bank account or take a job — not medieval France, the France of the Beatles; and in the United States, enduring marital rape as perfectly legal until the mid 1970s. Isn’t it great to be a woman.)

The idea of marrying your best friend, your confidant, and your sexual fantasy — all in one person, for life — didn’t really become a mainstream expectation until after the Second World War. Social historians call it the “companionate marriage.” In historical terms, it is roughly as old as the television.

Yet the romance industry treats this as if it were written into the fabric of the universe. And not just the marriage — the full bundle. Think about what the Standard Model actually requires. Not just a shared home, but the same house, the same bed, the same group of friends, the same holidays, sometimes the same bank account. Hobbies, shared where possible — and if not, at least explained. Evenings together, as a rule. Weekends together. Family obligations together. An implicit right to an opinion on each other’s career, finances, families, and whether that coat is really worth it. The full merger. All of it non-negotiable. All of it presented, by the romance novel, as the only available definition of love.

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Before you start nodding knowingly and composing a message about my attachment style — I have heard it, it has been said, we have all been to therapy — let me be clear: I am not saying you shouldn’t do it. If getting married in front of God with your first boyfriend, having five children, and being faithfully, enthusiastically committed for life is genuinely your thing, I am happy for you. You should absolutely do it. Some people do it brilliantly.

I’m arguing for the chocolate ice cream, not against vanilla. The problem is we’ve decided vanilla is the only flavor that counts as ice cream. Chocolate is “avoidant.” Salted caramel is “commitment issues.” Vanilla with chocolate chips — which frankly sounds lovely — is “unconventional,” and unconventional is still said with a slight wince, as if the people eating it will eventually come around.

They won’t. And they shouldn’t have to.

Think about the question inevitably hanging over couples who’ve been together a while: “So where is this going?”

The relationship doesn’t need to go anywhere. It isn’t late for a dentist appointment. The more honest questions are: What do you actually want? What does your partner actually want? What works for the two specific, fastidious, peculiar people you happen to be?

Philosopher and psychotherapist Alain de Botton points out that the Standard Model bundles together things with no logical reason to be connected. Why should sharing a bed entail merging finances? Why does loving someone equal wanting to raise children with them? We’d find it bizarre if every athlete were required to run a race, swim, lift weights, box, and do the pole vault — regardless of which they were actually good at. Yet we apply exactly this logic to love, and call it romantic.

I know couples who don’t share a bed. They are happy, well-rested, and entirely normal. I also know couples who desperately want to sleep in separate rooms — one of them snores like a tractor, the other hasn’t had eight consecutive hours since the previous decade — but can’t bring themselves to do it, because sleeping apart would feel like a moral failure. As if the relationship’s structural integrity depends on two people lying next to each other in shared exhaustion.

It does not.

I’ve been thinking about those other couples. The ones who’d quietly figured something out — not the Standard Model, something else, something actually theirs. And I wanted to know if I could put that question into a romance novel. Still warm, still funny, still with all the heat the genre promises. Just without the predetermined destination.

The result is Rome When It Rains. Out this Friday, June 26th.

Brief description, since you’ve been patient: somewhere between romcom and literary romance, set in Europe. Short enough for a weekend, long enough to care — or I have failed and would like to apologize in advance. Adult scenes, including an f/f scene, because that is another very common fantasy we all collectively pretend we don’t have. No billionaires.

Whether the experiment worked is yours to decide. All I can tell you is that it’s warm and funny, and you’ll probably enjoy it more if you don’t normally read romance — because then you haven’t yet been trained to expect the ending I’m withholding from you.

PRE-ORDER HERE

The first 100 people also get a free guide to Rome — the real, beautifully messy one, organized through its films. Real places, real history, and what was shot where. Written by someone who lives there – yours truly.

The vanilla is perfectly fine. I just wanted to know if the chocolate was any good.

Cross the Channel, and it dissolves.

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In France, barely half agree. In Germany, a little more than half. Across Europe, the response to the question is less a verdict than a shrug.

Researchers have noted this without further comment. They are, presumably, professionals.

The instinct is to file this under of course they did and move on. The French. Very sophisticated. Very comfortable with desire. Famously unconcerned with guilt as a concept. This is the take that has lived in every British newspaper column since approximately 1987, and it lets us off the hook for thinking about it further.

But that instinct is lazy. Because the interesting thing isn’t the 47%. It’s what’s underneath it.

A separate European survey found that 54% of French people believe you can love your partner while being unfaithful to them.

Sit with that for a moment.

Not: infidelity is fine. Not: do what you want. But: love and fidelity are not the same thing. You can have one without the other. They are separable categories.

In most of the Anglophone moral framework, this is about as coherent as announcing you've quit smoking between cigarettes. Fidelity is the proof of love. To cheat is to reveal that you never really loved them — or not enough. The whole architecture of how we talk about betrayal rests on this equivalence. He cheated, so clearly he didn’t love her. She cheated, so clearly the marriage was already over. It’s not a conclusion we reach. It’s the premise we start from.

France, apparently, disagrees. And has for a while.

Choderlos de Laclos published Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1782.

You probably know it — either from the novel itself, or from the John Malkovich film, or from the Cruel Intentions era of your adolescence, which honestly holds up.

Two French aristocrats, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, play elaborate games with desire. They seduce, manipulate, and destroy people as an intellectual sport. It ends very badly. For everyone.

It is not a celebration of infidelity.

But it is something more interesting: a text from 1782 in which desire is treated as a psychological and philosophical phenomenon worth examining carefully, without a moral verdict stapled to every page. Laclos wasn’t writing a cautionary tale. He was dissecting something. Holding it up to the light. The tone is cool and precise, almost clinical — as if desire were a subject deserving serious intellectual attention rather than a sin to be judged.

Not too long before, Samuel Richardson had written Clarissa on the other side of the Channel. A 1,500-page novel — and I cannot stress enough how much Richardson wanted you to understand this — in which a woman is destroyed by a man who wants her, and the entire moral architecture of the book is about virtue, sin, and judgment. The predator is damned. The victim is martyred. The lesson is obvious. For context: the Bible is approximately 800,000 words. Clarissa is 969,000. Richardson really committed to the point.

You are not expected to come away from it thinking about desire. You are expected to come away knowing what is right.

Two novels. Two neighbouring countries. Two completely different questions being asked about the same human experience.

The data does complicate the easy myth of French exceptionalism, though — in a useful direction.

France isn’t actually the most unfaithful country in Europe. Italy is, at 45% of people having been unfaithful. Germany and Belgium are also ahead. The country that moralises infidelity the least is not, it turns out, the country that practises it the most.

Have you been ever been unfaithful? Survey data from 2022. Source.

And the British — morally closest to Americans in this survey, most likely to regret their infidelity (48% do) — don’t appear to cheat less than anyone else as a result. They just feel worse about it.

Do the thing. Feel terrible. Never discuss it. Which is, honestly, a very British solution to the problem.

But here’s the question the data keeps raising: what is the moral condemnation actually for?

If the answer is preventing the behaviour, the numbers clearly don’t support it. Even in countries with Inquisition-level attitudes to cheating, at least a quarter of people still do. Moral certainty and actual behaviour are not, it turns out, on speaking terms.

What the condemnation might be doing instead is foreclosing a conversation.

If infidelity is simply wrong — morally unacceptable, full stop, case closed — then there’s nothing left to examine. No question about what desire actually is, or why it doesn’t always map neatly onto love, or why the thing that starts as electric between two people becomes comfortable and then routine and then, for some people, invisible. No question about whether fidelity-as-ownership is a loving framework or a property framework that learned to dress better. No question about what we’re actually asking of people when we ask them to feel desire exclusively for one person, indefinitely, in perpetuity, while life and time do what they do.

France is still asking those questions. Or at least, fewer French people have stopped asking them.

The French answer isn’t obviously better. Laclos’s characters end up destroyed. The 54% who separate love from fidelity are not, I suspect, universally happy. Desire treated as a philosophical category rather than a moral one can go in cold and ruthless directions — the Marquise de Merteuil understood that better than anyone, and she still lost.

But the question is more honest.

Because the 84% consensus doesn’t mean 84% of people are faithful. It means 84% of people have agreed to feel bad about something that — evidence suggests — a meaningful portion of them will do anyway, and to call that feeling bad a form of moral superiority.

Which is not the same thing.

I reread Liaisons Dangereuses last year, and what struck me again was how contemporary it feels. Not the setting. The psychology. The gap between what people say about love and what they do with it. The way desire refuses to stay inside the container we’ve built for it. The discomfort that causes, and how quickly we reach for a moral category to make the discomfort stop.

Laclos wrote it in 1782. We’re still having the same argument.

Which suggests, possibly, that the problem isn’t moral failure.

It’s that the container was always the wrong shape.

Sources:

• Pew Research Center, Global Views on Morality (2014, fieldwork 2013): https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/01/14/french-more-accepting-of-infidelity-than-people-in-other-countries/

• Pew Research Center, Global Attitudes Survey (March 2026, fieldwork 2025): https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-country-survey-americans-especially-likely-to-view-fellow-citizens-as-morally-bad/

• Gleeden / YouGov, Observatoire Européen de l’Infidélité (June 2022): https://lareclame.fr/observatoire-infidelite-europe-gleeden-265812

• YouGov UK, Nearly a fifth have cheated on a partner (2015): https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/12404-one-five-british-adults-admit-affair

• Relationships Australia, Infidelity (January 2018): https://www.relationships.org.au/document/january-2018-infidelity/

• World Population Review, Infidelity Rates by Country: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/infidelity-rates-by-country

• Gallup, Values and Beliefs Survey (May 2025): https://news.gallup.com/poll/692801/adultery-cloning-seen-immoral-behaviors.aspx

• YaleGlobal, World Agrees: Adultery, While Prevalent, Is Wrong: https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/world-agrees-adultery-while-prevalent-wrong

Not because of an emergency. Not because someone was talking. Because I decided the film was too stupid to deserve my continued presence. The film was Eurotrip. I was nineteen. I left at the twenty-minute mark and walked home feeling completely justified.

This is the kind of person I was.

I read the Classics. Dickens, Austen, Joyce, Woolf — not from obligation but from genuine conviction that these were the correct things to have read, and I was very interested in being correct. I kept a mental ledger of books I’d finished and books I considered beneath me, and I consulted it often and without embarrassment. I was a delight at parties.

Film: the Eurotrip incident was not isolated. I had opinions about dialogue, plot logic, the use of stereotype as a substitute for characterization. I could appreciate bad films — but only the kind of bad that transcends incompetence to become something formally interesting. Duchamp’s Fountain in multiplex clothing. Nicolas Cage in films where he appears to be conducting a private war against the concept of restraint (i.e.: most films). The bad that knows what it’s doing.

Music: the sharpest edge. I cared mostly about lyrics — story, rhyme structure, vocabulary. Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma.” Courtney Barnett’s “History Eraser.” Songs where language was actually doing something. What I couldn’t forgive was laziness. The cheap fillers “baby” or “yeah.” The rhyme a five-year-old could have managed. Love songs that were essentially ooh you’re so pretty I love you please don’t leave me dressed up in a major key and sold as emotion.

James Blunt, for instance.

You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful,
it’s true

I saw your face
in a crowded place

and I don’t know what to do
‘cause I’ll never be with you.

Do. You. Face. Place.

These are not the rhymes of a man who tried and was defeated. These are the rhymes of a man who did not try.

I once spent fifteen minutes making this case to my husband. He listened. He conceded the rhymes. And then he said something I wasn’t ready for.

“At least he made something,” he said. “He wrote a song and recorded it and put it in the world. It’s easy to judge things. It’s much harder to make them.”

I filed this under Things I Am Not Yet Ready To Agree With.

I have a large folder.

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Then I started writing a novel.

It comes out in June — still slightly surreal to say out loud — and the process has given my husband’s observation a weight it didn’t have when I first heard it.

Making something you intend other people to read is not like reading. It’s more like walking into a crowded room with no clothes on, if the room also had strong opinions about narrative pacing. The self-doubt is constant and specific: I think this is good, or at least not bad, but what if I’m wrong? What if it’s bad and I can’t see it? WHAT IF IT’S LIKE THAT JAMES BLUNT SONG?

This is Dunning-Kruger territory and it is not comfortable. The people who are least competent are often the most confident, because they don’t yet have the framework to recognize their own gaps. The people who understand the field well enough to diagnose the problem are also the people who might have it. There is no reassuring position in this framework. I checked.

The logical next move is to look outward for the certainty your own judgment can’t provide. But alas, professional criticism doesn’t help either. The history of literature is a graveyard of editors who were wrong. Stoner sat unread for forty years. Bukowski was rejected for the better part of a decade. Even Harry Potter was turned down by twelve publishers — I think about those twelve editors sometimes with unashamed Schadenfreude.

The truth is, art is subjective. All the way down, apparently. Standards exist, but our ability to identify them in real time, in the work of people we don’t yet know, is imperfect and inconsistent and nobody can give you that certainty from the outside.

I am still a snob.

I want to be clear about this. The Blunt lyrics remain, in my view, not good. I have not revised my opinion of Eurotrip, though I will never know what happened in the final eighty minutes. My aesthetic frameworks are intact and I stand by them.

But something has changed. When I judge something now — and I do judge things, still, regularly — there’s a voice that asks: did you make it? Do you know what it costs?

I know now. We’ll see how June goes.

The snob is still here. She’s just quieter than she used to be.

In your twenties, love was a group project. Even when it was private, it was narrated — to the group chat, to the best friend on a walk, to your own notes app at 2am because you’d had a feeling that was very important and needed to be captured at all costs before it evaporated. Everyone tracked the arc. Post-mortems were held. Friends who had never met your boyfriend had strong opinions about him based on three screenshots and a voice note.

After 30, the audience quietly disperses.

People stop asking. Or they ask politely and don’t follow up, because they have their own lives now and frankly so do you. Your love life stops feeling like communal property. This can be unsettling at first — like being taken off a stage without being told the show was over.

And then you realize you don’t miss it.

Because without an audience, you start noticing how much of early love was performance. How many choices were driven by how they’d sound when retold. How often intensity stood in for meaning because it made a better story — and how often the story was actually the point.

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Quiet love is terrible content.

No updates. No crises. No screenshots worth forwarding. The most recent text in your thread says can you grab milk. It was sent at 4pm on a Wednesday.

What there is is routines, shared references, and inside jokes that require forty-five minutes of context to explain and still aren’t particularly funny to anyone else. Love after 30 often looks, from the outside, like two people who have simply decided to coexist peacefully in a small radius — which would have horrified your younger self and now feels like the goal.

It’s not less significant. It’s less symbolic.

It stops representing things: youth, possibility, proof that you’re doing it right. It doesn’t need to be aspirational, or aspirationally tragic. It doesn’t need to be a story at all.

There’s also less urgency. No sense that this must be the love that redeems all previous ones, or that if it doesn’t last forever it doesn’t count. Love doesn’t have to be permanent to be real. It just has to be honest while it exists. Which, if you think about it, is the minimum requirement for most decent things.

After 30, love is mostly two people doing unremarkable things together.

Watching each other load the dishwasher wrong, and saying nothing. Making the coffee without being asked, because you already know. Being the one they call when something small and good happens and they need someone to share it with.

They don’t make films about this. There’s no plot. Nobody is sprinting through a terminal.

But someone will drive you to the airport.

Every time, without being asked.

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.