Why I Started The Real Thing (Or: My Grievances With the Romance Industry, Presented With Love)
If you’ve ever finished a romance novel and thought "really?" — you’re in the right place.
Like it or not, romance sets the standard. From Disney to Fifty Shades, we’ve been marinating in a very specific idea of what love is supposed to feel like — and our lives, inevitably, fall a little short. Which has consequences.
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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