The Tyranny of the Romantic Narrative

Be a romantic! But don't let your story dictate your reality

I’m a romantic! Neither my evo bio readings nor my actual divorce have been able to turn me cynical with respect to love. And I generally think this is a good thing, at least given my personality. I’ll take passion with some volatility over boredom and stability. I’ll take irrational hope and promises of cosmic significance over pragmatic negotiation. But there are downsides to being a romantic, including the potential tyranny of your personal Romantic Narrative. 

The Romantic Narrative is especially relevant when your love story begins with serendipity, drama, and intensity. The more unexpected the meeting the more tempted we are to attribute it to fate. The more initial barriers that must be overcome the more invested we are in the happily ever after. The hotter the spark and the quicker the path to mutually felt emotional depth the more likely we are to see the other person as our soulmate, made for us, brought to us by a higher power. If you’re really hopeless you can create a convincing Romantic Narrative for yourself no matter what. Some people can frame even the objectively unromantic dating app meeting as fated… “if we hadn’t both logged on and swiped that day…” But a Romantic Narrative especially thrives when a couple has some combination of a great meet cute followed by external conflict which is only overcome as a result of their mutual intensity of feeling. 

The more Serendipitous (or Contingent) the Meeting…

In Alain de Botton’s “essays in love” the unnamed protagonist meets Chloe on a plane (“what were the chances…?” he calculates one in 5840.82). He can’t help but see their meeting as fated despite knowing that it’s not: “The calculation, far from convincing us of the rational arguments, only backed up the mystical interpretation of our fall into love. If the chances behind an event are enormously remote, yet the event occurs nevertheless, may one not be forgiven for invoking a fatalistic explanation?” He interprets our attraction to this sort of fatalistic explanation as resulting from self-protectiveness, a way to avoid the anxiety that there is no deeper meaning to life: “surrounded by chaos, we are understandably led to temper the full horror of contingency by suggesting that certain things happen to us because they have to, thereby giving the mess of life a sustaining purposiveness and direction.”

As our “essays in love” protagonist suggests, the flip side to seeing an unlikely meeting as fated is seeing it as random, something that could’ve just as easily been missed… contingent. When the initial infatuation is gone the serendipity of your meeting, which once proved the cosmic significance of it, can transform into terrifying coincidence. In Past Lives Nora explains the concept of inyeon as “providence or fate. But … specifically about relationships between people” to her eventual husband Arthur, saying:

It’s an inyeon if two strangers even walk past each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush, because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8,000 layers of inyeon over 8,000 lifetimes.

Later, while Hae Sung is visiting New York, Arthur expresses his anxiety that their ending up together was contingent rather than fated:

ARTHUR: What if you met somebody else at that residency? What if there was another writer from New York who'd also read all the same books you had and watched all the same movies and could give you useful notes on your plays and listen to you complain about your rehearsals?

NORA: That's not how life works.

ARTHUR: Yeah. But wouldn't you be laying here with him?

NORA: This is my life and I'm living it with you.

Of course, it’s true that she could’ve ended up with someone else. And of course, she’s right that this is irrelevant, and that “that’s not how life works.” But her comfort with the contingency of it all is heartbreaking. As our “essays in love” protagonist understands, avoiding this heartbreaking truth is why we engage in what he calls romantic fatalism: “Through romantic fatalism, we avoid the unthinkable thought that the need to love is always prior to our love for anyone in particular. [...] My mistake had been to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a given person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable.” Failing to recognize this “mistake” when one needs to, i.e. when one needs to exit the relationship, is one of the ways that the Romantic Narrative can become tyrannical. If you were fated to meet, if you truly believe your story, how can you consider ending it?

The more Dramatic the Conflict…

Any good story needs a conflict to be compelling. In RRR, drawing on themes from the Ramayana, Sita waits for years while Ram infiltrates the British police with the eventual aim of securing weapons for rebellion, never losing hope that he will return. In Romeo and Juliet, their relationship is forbidden by their families, forcing them into secrecy and resulting in their eventual deaths. In Twilight, Bella and Edward must overcome his literal desire to kill her and drink her blood, quite the problem (!) as Contrapoints explores in in her latest (3hr!) video. Only insanity, or epic, supernatural love could possibly overcome these barriers. And once overcome, who could doubt the love that motivated the protagonists to persist? Even in more terrestrial stories, the mundanity of married life can be made grandiose through insane commitment. In Stuck in Love, Greg Kinnear’s character’s sad and creepy stalking behavior of his ex-wife is eventually vindicated when she finally returns home realizing she had just “gotten lost”.

Life imitates art. And even in the real world, conflict, drama, or difficulty, especially early in a relationship can add substantial weight to your personal Romantic Narrative. In my relationship with my ex-husband, the early conflict was generated by distance. After meeting on study abroad and dating for only 6 weeks we were separated. I stayed to study in Istanbul while he returned to Lehigh to finish his senior year. We were apart for four months during which we spent all of our free time texting and calling one another. By the time we actually got to see how our relationship worked in real life we were already substantially invested and had plenty of practice defending our relationship to others who thought it was “crazy” that we had committed so quickly.

Arthur’s anxiety in Past Lives could be interpreted as a fear of contingency, but it was also an expression of his distress about the ease and convenience of their relationship, and the decisions they made (or didn’t have to make) to make it work. This is especially true when he contrasts it with her, objectively better, story with Hae Sung:

ARTHUR: I was just thinking about what a good story this is.

NORA: The story of Hae Sung and me?

ARTHUR: Yeah. I just can't compete.

NORA: What do you mean?

ARTHUR: Childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later only to realize they were meant for each other.

NORA: We're not meant for each other.

ARTHUR: I know, I know. In the story, I would be the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny.

(LAUGHTER)

NORA: Shut up.

ARTHUR: Me? Well, think about it. Our story is just so boring. We met at an artist residency. We slept together because we both happened to be single. We realize we both live in New York, so we move in together to save money on rent. We got married so you could get a green card.

NORA: Oh, you make it sound so romantic.

ARTHUR: That's what I'm saying. I'm the guy you'd leave in the story when your ex-lover comes to take you away.

But what Arthur fails to appreciate, because his writer’s brain is stuck on the narrative intensity of the conflict between Nora and Hae Sung, is that his relationship with Nora is special because they had read all the same books and watched all the same movies and because he could give her useful notes on her plays and listen to her complain about her rehearsals, not in spite of these things! He’s missing the real truth that their many similarities, which made their relationship seem obvious, deserve to be counted as positives that prove their love rather than as reasons to doubt it. Hae Sung has the story and the past with Nora but he doesn’t actually have the characteristics she would want in a partner. Still, Arthur’s anxiety is natural. Nora and Hae Sung never got the chance to realize their love, and yet they’ve never forgotten one another after all these years. Arthur just walked into his relationship with Nora, sacrificing nothing, while Hae Sung has been quietly and painfully nursing his love for her for decades. How can his pain not be rewarded with the prize? How can he not get the girl? Who wouldn’t root for him?

The Hotter the Spark…

A lot of people advise people who are dating to underweight the “spark”. To go on a second date with the kind and respectful man, even if he didn’t leave you with butterflies, and see if something can build. This is probably good advice but I think it’s dependent on the person. I certainly believe (and have seen real life examples of) a bond that grows slowly over time and results in a stable and happy long-term, loving relationship. But this is not how I operate. I was daydreaming about marrying my boyfriend three days after we met. I couldn’t get him off my mind. The night I met him, I knew I had met my best friend. He transformed my world in the best way. And while that certainly wouldn’t be my bar in terms of the level of initial connection I’d need to want to keep seeing someone, it’s hard for me to imagine getting into a relationship that started off just “meh”.

An intense and immediate spark typically leads to romantic idealization. A feeling that the other party is not only perfect in every way but made for you, able to understand you, spiritually connected with you in a way that outsiders will never understand. In “essays in love” our protagonist says “Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent normality of the loved one. Hence the boredom of lovers for those standing on the side-lines.” I’m sure that some level of idealization can occur on the more mundane path towards building mutual love, when there isn’t such a hot spark, but I think this is most characteristic of relationships that have that attribute in spades. And when someone fits you so well, when they feel like the best friend you couldn’t possibly have imagined, when they just get you immediately, how could you not be tempted to think that you really are meant for each other? That your love for one another should and will trump everything else?

Don’t let your story dictate your reality

When some combination of these factors is present at the outset of the relationship, and especially when all three of them are, a romantic like me can’t help but construct a grandiose Romantic Narrative. This has upsides. I want to be grandiose (and even irrational!) about my love. But what happens if the relationship sours? When the idealization fades and you’re left with someone that you don’t actually seem to get along with all that well? This is where the Romantic Narrative can become tyrannical. It can excuse dysfunction. If you’ve invested so much importance into the story of your relationship you can end up insufficiently reacting to the information you’re receiving about its quality in practice. 

In retrospect, I think the initial conflict of distance that I overcame with my ex made it more difficult for me to notice, or at least to properly appreciate and respond to, the signals that we were not in fact very well matched as they came in over the subsequent years. This isn’t to say that was all there was to it, but I think it contributed to me failing to end the relationship well after it was clear that we were psychologically incompatible and had different values and goals (most importantly around having children). I’d been keeping alive the story that, difficult as our relationship was, my husband was the person I was meant to be with, so how was I to leave? Moreover, I’d promised things to him, and I didn’t see myself as the kind of person who could break such promises. And we weren’t the kind of people who get divorced! We were high conscientiousness, highly educated, reasonable people who grew up in two parent households! The fear of ending a relationship can be just as much about maintaining personal identity as it is about avoiding loneliness. I think about this as a prioritization of the remembering self over the experiencing self. Preserving the idea of who you are and what you’ve told yourself about your relationship over your lived experience.

In “essays in love” our destructively romantic protagonist plans to kill himself after Chloe leaves him for his more successful colleague. After all “If Chloe really was my whole life, was it not normal that I should end that life to prove it was impossible without her?” He had so fully bought into his Romantic Narrative that it simply seemed dishonest to carry on with it no longer on track. Better to transform his love story into a Shakespearean tragedy than to accept that he never really had love in the first place, or even more terrifying, that he did have it… and he just lost it, and that he’ll be fine. The imagined satisfaction of her falling to her knees upon hearing about his death was motivation enough for him to cut his life short: “The most terrible regret and remorse would follow - she would blame herself for not understanding me, for being so cruel, for being so shortsighted. Had any other man been so devoted to her as to take his own life for her?” But he is interrupted. And ultimately, painfully, he slowly forgets Chloe: “I had to revisit almost every physical location, rewrite over every topic of conversation, replay every song and every activity that she and I had shared in order to reconquer them for the present, in order to defuse their associations. But gradually I forgot.” And eventually, he recovers. As we always do.

In the ending of Past Lives Nora says her farewell to Hae Sung, walks back to her husband and sobs into his embrace. I love this ending. It made Nora’s pragmatic comfort with contingency and her willingness to accept and feel the loss of never having walked the fork in the road labeled “Hae Sung” feel romantic and wise. Nora is able to see contingency for what it is. Inevitable. There isn’t any one meeting that’s truly any more serendipitous than another. And every choice made is a path not explored. Everything is contingent on meaningless details which brought each person to that place at that time in that mood. Some relationships will never be developed or explored for equally random and meaningless reasons. And that’s just how life works. There’s nothing to fix.

The desperation with which our “essays in love” protagonist clings to his Romantic Narrative, willing to die rather than question its truth, expresses his grief over the loss of Chloe but also his fear, not only of being forgotten, but of forgetting her, and who he was with her. As he says earlier in the book “there is a particular cruelty in the thought of one’s indifference towards past loves” and “I realized that if my love for Chloe constituted the essence of my self at that moment, then the definitive end of my love for her would mean nothing less than the death of a part of me”. In Past Lives Nora weeps not so much over losing the chance to develop a real relationship with Hae Sung, but over losing access to a part of herself: who she was as a girl in Korea. A part of herself that Hae Sung has been holding onto for her. The only thing more heartbreaking than the pain of mourning the loss of love is the thought that eventually, you will not be in pain anymore. That you’ll become rather indifferent. That you’ll have transformed so fully that you’ll see that your Romantic Narrative is not only not an epic love story… but that it isn’t even a tragedy, just a painful but largely unremarkable human experience.

In All About Love, bell hooks presents Scott Peck’s definition of love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”. She stresses that love is not a feeling but an active choice and that “To truly love we must mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as open and honest communication.” I find this view of love compelling. And importantly, it draws our attention towards the actual experience of loving and being loved and away from the story we’ve told ourself about our love. Viewing love as an active choice rather than as an uncontrollable feeling situates you in the present moment, where the relationship is actually taking place.

Believing in your own Romantic Narrative feels good. It’s wonderful to see your partner this way and it’s a good thing to feel lucky that you have the life you have and have met the people you’ve met, especially those who’ve supported you, helped you grow, assuaged your deepest feelings of loneliness, truly accepted you. But even still. When all signs are telling you that you’re not happy. That the relationship is not “good” or “healthy” or “fair”, holding on to your Romantic Narrative has the potential to prevent you from doing what’s right for you, and for everyone else. So, be a romantic! But don’t let your story dictate your reality. You only have one life, so don’t live it in an unsuitable relationship, no matter how compelling the narrative you’ve been telling yourself is.