Happily Ever After (And Other Recent Inventions)

Picture a romantic relationship — the real thing, not the early stages when everyone’s still on their best behavior and pretending to have no opinions about how a dishwasher should be loaded.

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.

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.

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.