Romance is Dead. Long Live Romance

On the commercialization of love and the one practical thing you can do this Valentines Day to resurrect romance

Here’s your calendar ding reminder that tomorrow is Valentine’s day—the day we collectively love to hate or at least ignore. Around this time each year, a dissenting chorus of voices rises up against the commercialization of love. Even if you celebrate and like this day, maybe you’ve felt this too. The sentiment goes like this: No one should tell me when I have to act romantic. No one should force me to buy flowers and chocolates and plan a date night. I can do that on my own. Love should not be an obligation.

I get it. The commercialization is a thing for sure. More candy is sold for Valentines day than Halloween (in 2022, a whopping 4.1 billion for lover’s day compared to 3.1 billion for the trick or treaters). Around 90% of people are predicted to buy candy this year (will the candy be less red and pink without red dye 3?). And it’s estimated that the average couple will spend almost $200 per person on Valentines. Some of you may be feeling that hangover already.

But I don’t think that’s why Valentine’s Day gets such a bad rap. I think something about romance itself makes us want to run. Because it puts us in a bind.

The tension is this: Romance draws out one of our deepest, most core desires. In our heart of hearts, we all want to be seen. Not just loved, like the passing “love you”’s we exchange on the fly as we come and go in the daily routines of life. Those certainly help us survive the grind and keep the lights of love on. But we all need moments where we get deeper drinks of love with more attention and connection. I’m calling it being seen. We all want someone to witness our lives, how we show up and how we shine in the world, to notice our hard work, our tough battles, and celebrate our resilience and our wins. We all need wows and cheers from the people we love.

And yet, this very desire is so vulnerable. It draws out one of our deepest fears right along with it: No one wants to feel ignored, unseen, unappreciated, un-special, or overlooked. We may wonder if it’s a sign we are actually undesireable or disappointing or easily rejected or just plain too ordinary to move anybody. And that fear can haunt our very desire to be seen. That is a terribly exposing position to be in.

Romance has a way of putting us face to face with this desire and this fear. Which only gets compounded more by our history of love from so many yesterdays. No wonder it’s easier to avoid it all together.

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

Death of the romantic

Avoiding Valentine’s day is but one of a million ways we can eschew the bind of love.

Take dating fatigue—the new ailment brought on by dating apps. Fostering romance through the narrow window of a phone screen can wear out even the most ardent cupids. All that swiping and messaging might lead to connection. But it can vaporize with a head spinning swiftness and no explanation. That takes its toll on anyone wanting to actually see and be seen. I admire those that persevere to find real love.

But those romance seekers may be an ever-shrinking minority. So many just give up and turn the app into what it resembles—the DoorDash of dating. “I just ordered a guy on Tinder for delivery!” one woman started announcing to her friends when she got new dates.¹ The system seems set up to commodify people and destroy anything resembling the slow burn of romance. Another woman concluded from her own repeatedly traumatic experiences, “People don’t turn to the app to come out the other end with a better relationship to relationships, with a better relationship to their body, or to sex.” What happens when a whole group of people just give up on seeing and being seen?

Others handle the bind of romance with much greater aggression. They annihilate anything that resembles romantic sentiment and kill the lover within. You may know the name Andrew Tate and you may not. He’s a supposed masculinity influencer who really wants to be every man’s new hero. Last December, he tweeted, “Being impressed by a woman’s beauty is super g**.” With the punch of a flash bang sexual slur, Andrew makes his choice very clear. He has no plans to be a lover or romantic at all and openly mocks any man who is genuinely moved by the beauty of a woman. Another man, 50 cent, in his ever popular rap song, says in blunt terms, “I’m into having sex. I ain’t into making love.” There is absolutely no subtlety here. He too is announcing: I’ve killed the romantic. Don’t expect me to be a lover in anyway.

But if you kill off the romantic what is left? The sad part is these men aren’t giving up on women in general. They’ll just do it from a place of power. Without the lover within, a man’s center shifts to his ego (which we will talk about more in my next post). Relationship to a woman becomes pure control. It will come as no surprise that Andrew Tate is on trial for sex trafficking.

Romance is freaking scary. I get it. To actually let yourself behold another in their beauty, to be undone with awe, is staggering. And to take the plunge of vulnerability in response—it’s not for the faint of heart. It requires a person with bravery, security, and humility. Some just shrink away from this.

Most of us don’t run that far from the lover within. We don’t hold that much fear. We aren’t that crippled. Be grateful. It means your courage is still intact and not that far away.

I would guess most of us simply hide in the routines of life. We get too busy for romance. The grind allows us to take for granted each other’s presence. It affords us a reasonable alibi for our absence from trying. We stay safely distant in the work of life. We become good roommates, even good teammates, but lovers?

Don’t get me wrong. Trusting each other to share the work load in a marriage is really important stuff. It’s actually a huge part of intimacy. Partners bond in those high-five and go-team moments. A kiss goodbye in the morning before work or those texts by day about car repairs and kids’ practice times or the night time conversations to make the budget work—those all add up to essential camaraderie. It also happens to be how the mortgage gets paid, how the kids get fed, how the laundry gets done. We spin our steps in the work-a-day world to make life hum. And I know so many would love to have their partner actually participate with this more.

But even there, we can’t escape our craving to be seen. For those who want your spouse to show up and do more work, isn’t being seen for your hard labor exactly what you want? Don’t you want your partner to notice your exhaustion and honor it and appreciate you by stepping in to help more?

What Resurrects Romance?

The danger comes when we stop seeing each other in any other way than coworkers or roommates. We can’t treat each other only as a means to an end, even a shared end like survival, or something will wither and die between us. We need to step out of survival mode into . . . something else. And in partnered relationships, romance is that something else. We all kinda know romance requires a different way of relating than teammate mode. But what do we actually step into? What do we actually do?

Martin Buber wrote an entire philosophy on human relationships called I and Thou. In it, he honors that we all treat each other as a means to an end sometimes—an I-It way of relating.. It's actually a necessary part of life. For example, it’s okay that I want the customer service rep to actually fix my phone bill or the plumber I hire to fix my broken water pipe, please. It’s also okay that my wife relies on me to pickup our boys from school when it’s my turn. That’s reasonable.

But Buber makes clear this cannot be the only way we relate. In his words we all need I-Thou moments together. He calls this “encountering” each other, where relating and knowing becomes the point. It’s where we witness each other’s lives. It’s where we really see and stand in awe of the shimmering self infused in each of us by God. He believed these sorts of encounters were the only way to renew romance. Here are his own words (Note: the You in this quote is God and his glory within each of us).

“Marriage can never be renewed except by that which is the source of all true marriage: that two human beings reveal the You to one another.”

The category we are talking about here is awe. And I’m with Buber on this one: Romance is cultivated and grown and renewed through awe. Sex and romance both hang on the stuff of awe. Deeper than flowers and chocolates, jewelry and expensive dates, romance speaks the language of wow.

Awe is about as esoteric of a word as words get. I dealt extensively with awe as a basis for healthy sexuality in my book. So I am not going to unpack the essence of awe here. Instead I want to try and give you a practical picture of it. I want to help you live everyday awe and therefore everyday romance in your life and marriage.

You actually shine as a person way more than you know. We shine all the time with each other. Yes, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins laments, a lot can get “…bleared, smeared with toil…” in the machinations of life. But it’s never eradicated. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things…” and deep down in you, too. It’s your very essence as a human. When David sought to understand his own existence, he came to this conclusion in Psalm 8:5:

“Yet we’ve so narrowly missed being gods, bright with Eden’s dawn light.”

The trick to practicing awe in romance is simply this: You need only retrain our eyes to catch your spouse when they shine.

It could be a brilliant thought they share in a discussion. You might see the patient way they handle a hard conversation with your child. You may catch them in the aisle of Target dancing to the music, as I have with Amanda. You might see them endure hard work in counseling or in a house project. You may find them journaling in tears or worshipping in secret and witness their deep soulfulness again. You might savor a new recipe they tried. Or you might simply find on a Saturday morning, while they stand doing dishes, the most moving glint of their beauty in the morning sun.

Now simply put words to it. Name what you see. And share it. Sure, make it a card or a letter. Or make it a text. Make it a passing comment before bed. Or better yet, in the moment they shine, say it right then and there.

This valentines day may I invite you to give the greatest give you can. Your face. Your presence and attention. Your eyes. See your partner. Or if you’re single, see those around you that you care about. See something in them. Be moved by them. Put it to words and tell them. Sure buy the flowers or the chocolates and do your thing. But even deeper show people your awe with your face and your words. You’ll make a special someone (or many someone’s you care about) feel truly loved.

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Want to talk with me about this post? Monday, February 24, at 6:30pm MT/8:30pm ET, I am hosting a Zoom conversation exclusively for paid subscribers, where I teach a little more and answer all your questions. These are such rich conversations for me! To join us, upgrade your membership (see below) for $5 a month (cancel anytime). The Zoom link will be found here.

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1. Christine Emba. Rethinking Sex: A Provocation (New York: Sentinel, 2022), 121.