What does romance look like?
Most likely, the first images that will spring to your mind are derived from movies. Roses on a bed. The dream house built by the waiting, ever-loyal, lover. The romantic arriving at the last moment to intervene, to declare their love as the right path.
Perhaps your mind will then drift to the forms of romance that you have experienced, that read as romantic to you in particular. Maybe the ability to sit in comfortable silence with your partner on the park bench is the ultimate marker of romance. Maybe you experience romance most acutely in the almost-ing of desire–brushing the other’s shoulder as you walk in the park, the relief you feel when you see their name light up the screen on your phone.
What do all of these definitions have in common? They are stories, which is, quite literally, the etymology of ‘romance.’ Romance comes from Romanus, which means, simply, “Roman.” This is the root of the word Romanicus “of or in the Roman style”, which eventually becomes the old French Romanz “verse narrative” and finally Romaunce “a story, written or recited, in verse, telling of the adventures of a knight or hero.”
Romance and its etymological evolution has to be seen not just for the word/concept in and of itself, but the word as held in contrast to something else. Here, the opposition is old Latin texts versus medieval vernacular tales, whose themes focus on “chivalric adventures filled with miraculous deeds.” Our modern association with romance as a somewhat archaic practice, built around strict binary gender roles, isn’t misplaced. In its root sense, romance is the image of a knight winning a jousting tournament and presenting the ‘lady’ with a rose.
But rather than scoffing off what feels antiquated and no longer aligned with modern ideals of mutuality, autonomy, and self-realisation in partnership, it’s worth ‘breaking into the building’ of romance and taking a good look at the architecture.
Here is one way to look at it: romance, from a zoomed out perspective, is a story about the heroism incited by love. Whether the act is jousting or bringing your partner a coffee in bed, there are two underlying commonalities. The first is willing self-sacrifice, or at the very least, volunteering for discomfort. The discomfort could come in many forms: discomfort of cold feet on the tile in the early morning while you make the coffee and your partner remains swaddled in blankets. The discomfort of spending money on a meal or a piece of jewelry or ‘overpriced’ roses that feels lavish, almost unnecessary, but necessary because of its import to the other. The discomfort could be literally fighting a dragon.
The second is the narrative structure inherent to these acts. We are obsessed with romance. Not only do we love to tell and absorb stories of romance (romance is one of the best selling genres in publishing, is a narrative backbone in almost all movies, etc.), but as we enact romance, we are telling ourselves a story about our action. It’s an inherently meta activity, in which every act and object is recognized as a signifier rather than just itself. The rose means something. The coffee means something.
This brings me to my own, personal definition of romance, which I debated with a dear friend over dinner recently. To me, romance is a ‘commitment to delight-ment.’ I made up the word delight-ment because it felt inaccurate to say only ‘delight’ or ‘to delight others.’ There’s a mutuality in romance to me, in which both people consent to endowing a particular moment or act with something sacred, with extra-meaning. To be a romantic, to me, is to revel in the act of making life more-than, while also being able to hold an amusement, a levity, about how funny human nature is. The performativity of romance, which seems to be what people react to so strongly (whether it is negative or positive) is beautiful to me, because it is in an indicator of our capacity and our desire to not just be clumps of matter spinning randomly through the universe, but to be, at the very least, random clumps of matter who tell stories about ourselves and others, and in so doing, elevate moments from an endless stream into singularity, which is to say, into mattering.