In Defense of Romance
Michelle Carlin
10/11/20267 min read
I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. Not really relationships, but love, because I think those have somehow become two different conversations.
The older I get, the more it feels like we’ve taken romance and turned it into something incredibly practical. We talk about relationships in terms of compatibility, attachment styles, shared values, emotional availability, finances, communication, whether someone wants kids, and whether they generally have their shit together. Obviously, all of that matters. I’ve been in enough terrible relationships to know that love is not enough to make a relationship work. You can love someone and still be miserable with them. You can love someone who lies to you. You can love someone who cannot meet you emotionally. You can love someone and still need to leave. I know that better than I ever wanted to.
But I also wonder if we’ve gone so far in the other direction that we’ve made love boring. Sometimes it sounds like we’re choosing someone to run a small business with. Do we have similar schedules? Do we communicate well? Can we divide household responsibilities? Do our retirement goals align? Great. Let’s get married.
I don’t know. Something about that makes me sad, because where is the romance? Where is the part that makes absolutely no fucking sense?
I say this as someone with OCD, which means I have spent an almost comical amount of my life trying to figure out exactly what love is. Do I love this person? Do I love them enough? How do I know? Should I feel more? Should I feel less? Is this anxiety? Is this intuition? Is this trauma? Is this attachment? Is this love? At some point, if you analyze something long enough, you can take every ounce of magic out of it.
There have been times when I’ve genuinely wondered if romantic love is even real. Maybe we made the whole thing up. Maybe we meet someone who hits the right combination of childhood wounds, hormones, attraction, and timing, and we call it love. Then eventually the chemicals wear off, real life takes over, and two people spend the next twenty years talking about the mortgage and what they need from Costco. I’m kidding, but only kind of.
I’ve had relationships where I kept asking myself the same question over and over again: Why isn’t this enough? I asked it in my marriage. I’ve asked it in other relationships. I’ve asked it about my job and even about my life. Why can’t I just be happy with this?
For a long time, I thought the fact that I kept asking that question meant there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was impossible to satisfy. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe OCD was always going to find something wrong. Maybe trauma had made ordinary love feel boring because my nervous system was used to chaos. There may be truth in some of that, but I don’t think it’s the whole truth anymore.
Something happened to me in the last few years that complicated the story: I softened with someone. Really softened. That is not something I do easily.
For most of my life, I’ve had armor around me that I didn’t even realize was armor. I could be vulnerable. I could talk about feelings. I could tell someone incredibly personal things. I could do all the things that technically look like intimacy, but this was different. I could actually feel myself opening. My body felt different. My heart felt different. There was a tenderness in me that I honestly wasn’t sure existed anymore.
The shitty part is that the person I opened to ultimately wasn’t someone I could trust with that openness. That took me a while to understand because I thought that if the person wasn’t right, maybe the feeling wasn’t real either. Maybe I had imagined it. Maybe it was attachment, trauma, projection, or my nervous system latching onto someone and creating a story around him. Maybe some of those things were involved. I don’t know.
I do think we have become very good at explaining love away, though. Everything has a psychological explanation now. Chemistry is attachment. Longing is limerence. Intensity is dysregulation. Desire is dopamine. Feeling drawn to someone is projection. Sometimes those explanations are absolutely correct, but I wonder if we’ve become so afraid of being fooled by love that we’ve started treating the experience of being moved by another human being as something suspicious.
I don’t want to do that anymore.
Whatever that relationship was, something real happened inside me. I learned that I could soften. I learned that I could let someone affect me. I learned that underneath all of the independence, armor, and “I don’t fucking need anybody,” there is actually a deeply romantic person. That surprised me.
Losing the person did not mean I lost that part of myself. For a while, I was afraid I would never feel that way about anyone again, but I don’t really believe that anymore. If anything, the experience showed me what I’m capable of. A feeling can be real even when the relationship cannot survive it.
Maybe that is part of why I’m less interested now in having a relationship just to have one. I’ve already done that. I’ve spent huge portions of my life doing for other people, carrying relationships, trying harder, explaining myself, making things work, and asking myself why I couldn’t just be happy with what was in front of me. I’m tired of negotiating myself into love.
I can build a life alone. I know that now. I can travel alone, eat alone, sleep alone, go places alone, make decisions alone, and take care of myself. I can rebuild my life when it completely falls apart. I’ve already done it.
So, if I bring someone into my life again, I don’t want the primary argument for the relationship to be that life is easier with two people. I want to be in love. There, I said it. I want the stupid, ridiculous, big love.
I want to look at someone sometimes and be completely fucking delighted that they exist. I want to admire them and be curious about them. I want to know their mind and still want to know more. I want attraction and friendship and tenderness and laughter. I want someone who can meet me in the places I’ve spent years learning how to meet myself.
I want the mundane stuff, too. I actually think there is something incredibly romantic about ordinary life with someone you love: making coffee, going to the grocery store, sitting on the couch doing absolutely nothing, or knowing what someone wants without asking because you’ve known them that long. I don’t need fireworks every Tuesday, but I want something underneath the ordinary. I want the music underneath it.
I don’t think wanting that means I want dysfunction. That distinction has become incredibly important to me. I don’t want chaos, betrayal, or someone emotionally unavailable whom I have to chase. I don’t want another relationship where I carry all the emotional weight and call it love, and I don’t want to confuse suffering with depth ever again.
What I want is actually much harder. I want safety and aliveness at the same time. I want my nervous system to soften without my discernment disappearing. I want to be able to open my heart without abandoning myself.
Maybe that kind of love is rare. I think I’m okay with that.
I used to have this fear that if I walked away from someone, that was it. What if I never found someone else? What if that was my chance? What if I was expecting too much? What if I ended up alone because I couldn’t just be satisfied? Fear can make “good enough” look incredibly convincing.
Being alone doesn’t scare me in the same way anymore. I know what it costs me to be with the wrong person. I know what it costs me to abandon myself just so I can say I have somebody. Being alone is cheaper and, honestly, a lot more peaceful.
So yes, I’m willing to wait. Not for a perfect person. Jesus Christ, no. I don’t want someone who never annoys me, disappoints me, or triggers anything in me. I don’t expect another human being to provide the certainty that my OCD has spent years demanding. I know better than that.
I’m waiting for something I don’t really know how to measure. Something grounded and a little bit magical. Someone I can build an ordinary life with without the love itself becoming ordinary. Someone who feels like a choice, not a compromise I talked myself into because I was afraid of being alone.
Maybe I’ll find it. Maybe I won’t. I think that’s the part I finally have to be honest about. There is no guarantee that some enormous love story is waiting for me. Maybe romantic love really is mostly projection and biology and two people trying to make life less lonely. My OCD would probably love for me to figure that out once and for all.
Unfortunately for my OCD, I don’t think love works that way. There is no answer that will finally settle the question. There is just the risk of loving.
After everything I’ve been through, there is still some ridiculous little romantic in me who believes there is something more. She believes two people can recognize something in each other. She believes you can be deeply known without being consumed. She believes love can be safe without becoming dull, and that ordinary life can still have music underneath it.
I spent a long time trying to talk her out of that. I don’t want to anymore.
I would rather build a beautiful life by myself and leave a seat open than fill it simply because I’m afraid nobody else is coming. I don’t know if the big love is out there. I really don’t. But I know I’m no longer willing to trade the possibility of it for the certainty of something that doesn’t move me.
For the first time in my life, I think I’m willing to wait.