Everything I learned about romance I learned from white men
but I learned love and intimacy from women
Like most teenagers who love to read and who have no idea what they want to do with their lives, I majored in English in college. My concentration was Modern British Literature and I looked forward to the days on our syllabus where I would finally learn about the Romantic poets. I ultimately assumed we would be reading love poems all day, which we did eventually. Come to find out that love isn't exactly what made it capital-R āRomanticā as a genre.
The likes of William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and William Blakeās poetry was a response to the neoclassicism that preceded it. Science and theology were at the core of neoclassicism and in contrast, the Romantics were all about the expression of human emotion and what brings it forth. Nature, nostalgia, the supernatural, death ā what lies beyond ourselves.
The genre of poetry may not have direct correlations to romantic love, but the association for me has always been there ā what lies beyond ourselves. Thatās what I think of when I think of love, my capacity for love and to love others.
Iāve grown to view love as an extension of myself, and that my love is abundant enough to live outside of myself. Thank you, to those dead white men for teaching me that.
But it didnāt start there. Looking back, I was concerned to find out that so much of my ideas about romanceā¦what it is, how it should feel, what it looks like, who it comes fromā¦have come from white men.
I started piecing together my early ideas of romance from Disney movies, naturally. That felt obvious and unavoidable. Grand declarations of love, a prince saving a princess, happily ever after. A formula as old as the fairy tales themselves.
From there, came the coming-of-age movies (despite growing up in the early 90s, I was deeply attached to John Hughes canon): The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, St Elmoās Fire, Some Kind of Wonderfulā¦
Beautiful, well-to-do white teenagers falling in and out of love throughout high school and college. Falling in love with your best friend. All in pursuit of sex I was very much not having at that age, but desperately wanting to. Itās how you show the person you love that you love them, after all.
And it didnāt stop there. Say Anything, High Fidelityā¦John Cusackās crash outs became a real emotional staple for me.
Then 500 Days of Summer and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Romance punctuated with heartbreak, after heartbreak. The realisation that you will, at some point, lose the person that you love the most in this life, and it could kill you. You might actually want it to.
The people in my life who know me well have heard me talk endlessly about the Before trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight) for damn near decades now. The first film is now 30 years old, but I remember first watching it in high school.
Now this was the epitome of romance. A chance encounter. Immediate attraction. A ādateā that spans an entire day, walking around, talking, drinking, kissing. But like all good things, they must come to an end and they leave each other with beautiful promises to meet again.
It still remains one of my favourites and I wonāt spoil it, despite it being 30 years since it was released. It couldāve ended there, and it doesnāt. What follows is an exploration of how relationships evolve as we age and mature. The excitement of young love in your 20s, the bitter and jadedness of your 30s, the anger and resentment of your 40s.
What happens to love and romance when you know everything there is to know about that person? And when you come to resent knowing everything there is to know about that person?
But where does that leave me now?
After dating since I was about 13, the search for romantic love continues.
Itās been a long time since Iāve even felt a sense of romance. Dates that once felt heady with anticipation, are now monotonous, stale, and akin to life admin. Things to tick off on a long list of to dos, because without doing the work, how will I ever meet anyone?
What better way to kill off romance than just trying to squeeze it in?
Which is why I wanted to go back to the sources that shaped me, that programmed me into the lover girl I am today. One of my biggest concerns is becoming ever-more jaded and closed off, but at least I have my therapist to work on that with.
The title of this has been somewhat misleading, and I hate to give white men credit that they so rarely deserve, although being a woman who exclusively dates men has meant that theyāve unfortunately been programmed into my life.
But where I learned about Romance (a particular type, letās say) from men, I learned about love from women.
The women in my life have been the most abundant givers of love and intimacy, almost to a fault, and are simultaneously afraid of not being worthy of it. Myself included.
bell hooks in āCommunion: The Female Search for Loveā said:
āI think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.ā
And I think thatās where my new romantic journey begins.
About me: I'm Nicole, the writer of A Crumb of Romance. Iām the co-author of The Half of It: Exploring the Mixed-Race Experience, a content creator and the co-host of the award-winning Mixed Up podcast. Having been chronically online since the age of 13, you can also find me on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Pinterest.