You Need More Romance in Your Life. And I Don’t Mean a Man.
On a word we shrank, and what it used to be big enough to hold.
I write romance novels for a living, so I want to be careful about how I say this.
The word is ruined.
Say “romance” to somebody and watch what happens behind their face. There’s a man in it somewhere. Probably a restaurant, and certainly a candle — and the poor candle is working, sent there to signal something to another person, on an agreed date, with an expected outcome. Romance has become a thing you do to somebody. It comes with a target and a budget, runs about twice a year, and is frequently disappointing.
That’s a very small room to keep a very large word in.
What it used to mean
Romance didn’t start out being about love. It started out being about language.
The Latin is romanice — “in the Roman manner” — which, in one of the better jokes in etymology, came to mean not in Latin. Rome’s own tongue had gone off to be the language of church and law and anyone hoping to sound important, and “Roman-ish” got demoted to mean the common speech. The way people actually talked. Romance was for regular folk from the very start. The word was democratic long before it was ever amorous.
Then it came to mean the stories told that way — knights, quests, sea voyages, giants, impossible tasks, the marvelous. A romance was a tale where the world turned out bigger and stranger than the one you’d woken up in that morning.
Love turned up in those stories, certainly. It was never the point of them. The point was wonder — the conviction that the world had more in it than could be got at by being sensible.
Somewhere along the way we handed the whole word over to the love plot and let the rest go. Which is rich, frankly, coming from me. I’ve spent my career on the love plot and I intend to spend more of it there.
But I want the rest of the word back.
Now — a pedant will tell you that what I want isn’t quite what it meant either. That romanice meant the common tongue, and then it meant knights, and it never once meant using your good china for cereal. The pedant is right. I’m not restoring the word. I’m stealing it.
But the theft is in the spirit of the thing. A word that started life meaning “the way ordinary people actually talk” was never meant to end up rationed, reserved, and booked in advance. If romance was for regular folk on ordinary days, I’m having it back for the ordinary days.
Romance is a way of paying attention
Here’s the version I’ve come round to, at fifty-five, with no particular authority:
Romance isn’t a relationship. It’s a posture. It’s deciding that ordinary life is worth the trouble — which sounds noble, and is in practice small, cheap, and slightly silly.
The good china on a Tuesday. Not because guests are coming; no guests are coming. For cereal. It’s yours, it’s lovely, and it has been sitting in that cupboard being wasted on nobody since some year you’d rather not calculate. The plates do not get to outlive you. That’s the deal.
Put on your good lipstick when you go to buy potatoes, simply because you like it. Not for the potatoes. Not for anyone in the shop, who will not look up. You’re the one who has to be behind your face all day, and you like it better with the lipstick on.
Light a candle at six for nobody. A room with a flame in it is a different room, and you happen to prefer the different room.
Make the coffee slowly, in the cup you like, when the instant would have done — and that’s exactly the point. The instant would have done.
Here’s what nobody warns you about: it’s fun. Not healing, not a practice, not a journey — fun, in the way it was fun to be eight and mind very much which mug was yours. There is a small, ridiculous, entirely private pleasure in a dandelion in a bottle on a windowsill that nobody will ever photograph, and I would not trade it for a restaurant.
The test
One question sorts the real thing from the performance, and I use it on myself regularly.
Would I still do this if nobody ever saw it?
Because there’s a version of all this that’s just decorating for an audience — the tablescape photographed, the flowers arranged for the feed, the life styled rather than lived. That isn’t romance. That’s advertising, and you’re both the agency and the product.
But a candle at six with the curtains shut, and the china out for cereal, and one dandelion — the weed, the thing you’re at war with — in a bottle above the washing up, where precisely one person on earth will ever see it?
If you’d do it with nobody watching, it’s yours.
Why it isn’t frivolous
I know how this reads against the news. Flowers don’t stop wars, and I’m not suggesting you light a candle at the world’s problems.
But people who go long enough without any of this don’t get tougher. They get numb, which we mistake for tough because it looks similar from a distance and costs nothing to maintain. Beauty is shelter — not from reality, but from being flattened by it. Noticing one good thing on a Tuesday keeps the part of you that can still be delighted in working order.
You want that part kept working. It’s how the good things get in.
Use the good plates tonight, and wear the lipstick to the shop tomorrow. Stop waiting for the big occasion — stop saving the best of everything for a day that has to be scheduled, approved, and attended by somebody else.
It’s Tuesday. That’s the occasion.
It was always Tuesday.