Diary 9/30/2025

I learned how to stop being so desperate for romance when I learned that romance is everywhere (getting more comfortable returning to Substack by posting the raws and unedited)

Sep 30, 2025

American culture is so deeply unromantic. American culture is so deeply unromantic, and I am shaking my own shoulders in the mirror until my thumbs leave little crescents on my clavicle because I know the answer, but think it still has to do with something in the mirror. American culture is so deeply unromantic because I am shaking a dressing container of oil and vinegar until I sweat and the cap leaks all over my hands in a tacky film, but the emulsion keeps splitting. American culture is so deeply unromantic (surprise, surprise, it has everything to do with capitalism and imperialism) because love and romance are delegated as a finite resource in scarcity or with its own economic value-add concept via exchange. Romance is seen as a sterile milestone rather than a precious phenomenon undeserving of mysticism, a series of tests, fortifying the nuclear family dynamic, and based on assigned heteronormative gender roles.

The woman completes a series of tests to prove her servile qualities and deservingness of paternalistic possession, from what the length of what she wears, to how she behaves when she is outside (as a status symbol and spokesperson for the man’s social respectibility), to how little she engages with her support system and social web, to how well she auditions a homemaker role, all aptly named the very unsexy and charmless “wifey material”. This woman is in a strict dichotomy with, a la rudimentary whore/madonna literary and sociological tropes, the pornified lens of women who do not align with this kind of heteronormative theater but are still the object (an offering of sexiness with no eroticism or throbbing or damp mattresses or animalistic fragrance or soaked skin…) of men’s after-hours and behind-screen consumptions in American “romance” culture.

In return, the man grants her a lifetime of constantly reauditioning for the role of “respectability” and shedding any aspect of her individuality in exchange for financing many cheesy, nonspecific, and rom-com-inspired Hallmark movie date copy-and-pastes. The individual within this heternormative woman role is never learned, nor seen, and therefore any efforts of “romance” are tailored to more products of algorithmic slop. (Quickly! Tell me her favorite book, why she loves it, and who she cherishes so dearly who gifted it to her. What does she like, and what is she afraid that she may like? What kind of sophisticated view on death does she have since she has experienced it so many times intimately, and what has that done to change how she needs to be loved culturally and interpersonally, quickly?)

The Americanized rubric for romantics bears semblance to how settler culture views trauma, grief, and pain as something you recover from, like an ailment with some kind of rectal injection and chalky pills, to continue to be a functional member of society. This perspective alludes to deeply imperialist undertones like labor alienation, isolation, and absent kinship models but misunderstands how melancholia is so innate to the human condition. Grief and melancholia are intrinsic to patterns in nature and even within animals, an elephant trunk somewhere touching the meat-plucked skull of its mother for hours, and it would be spiritually bankrupt to pretend that humans can evade the cycle of pain by pretending that nothing ever happened. So many global indigenous cultures center on ancestral worship and remembrance because of the importance of learning how to grow around trauma and pain, accepting them for their severity and reality, while finding out what about you has changed and needs to be understood, cared for, and emotionally regulated differently now.

In the same way, romance in the imperial core’s most fervent torchbearer is akin to a job interview to job interview. Incompatibility and its subsequent heartache are framed like a foregrounding failure, and the price for being so vulnerable around another human being. This is also a dynamic replicated even in queer relationships, which we are too quick to repeat a noncongruent and myopic iteration of the saying “the personal is political”. Queer people still do this by replicating cis and heteronormative capitalist notions of transaction and paternalistic possession of a partner’s actions, especially since all of us are socialized, regardless of sexuality and gender, to hate femme people and to pedestalize men.

I hate that the act of romance in American culture is seen as embarrassing! The heart gets in the way of production, like trauma, so we must silence the heart! We must silence sensation. We must treat silence as sensation. We must reward dismissal of rejection - how embarrassingggg - including ways that reward endangering and humiliating the person doing the rejecting. We must reward compliance in the theater of transaction and nonchalance, and, in tragic chagrin, must treat vulnerability as a sickness. Everything is embarrassing, but no one can be embarrassed.

Romance disobeys tests of heternormative transaction when I choose to savor it for what it is. What it was. What it can be. What it will be. It is unabashed in its mysticism and intensity, across art, poetry, music, dynamic gestures, religious sects, rituals, blown eyelashes, banished evil eyes, begged moon cycles, burned incense, and crossed fingers. Give me what Mahmoud Darwish, Kishwar Naheed, Aracelis Girmay, and Sanam Sheriff speak of, and don’t be afraid of the looseness, the loss of control. I, or some of my friends who have swallowed every last difficult pill outside of capitalist illness metaphors to love unadulterated in the vein of bell hooks and Che Guevara, reminisce often about lovers past with that same admiration for seeing something so beautiful while not lying to ourselves about the longevity and depth of heartache. Only through heartache did I learn who I am and what I found worth living for. Heartache is a different face of romance; together, the other side sweetens and bitters the other, and without each other, both would be flavorless and inhuman.

Without wanting to re-open doors or remake commitments to this pairing (keeping an ex an ex), I appreciate the ways that I have been romanced as something that has penetrated my soul. I am no longer the same person; instead of treating memories as something to move past forever, embarrassingly, or else risk jeopardizing the next test of loyalty. After all, what do we have left at the very end, beyond the ephemerality of our material possessions, besides our memories?

One of my favorite things a past lover taught me, a painter, was that their favorite moments with me weren’t just the elaborate dates and holidays, but the time that we’d spend in my room. Years ago, they studied the way that the light would strike my face in a yellowed brindle as I would stare off into the distance, fixated on something out of my world but in my curiosity. Whenever I see the people in my life who I love so dearly, who gestate entire worlds to be born and remarkable ones they’ll cultivate forever deep within them, universes that I feel so privileged to see, I see the way the light now hits the bridge of their nose. I study how it glints off their cheeks, the sweat off their foreheads. I see how it hits the car window as they sleep in the back seat, strokes their face with its golden palm, and their lashes glow umber like kindling. My desperation for romance has ended, as a romantic, because I have learned that romance is all around.

I am so excited to see what my friends’ faces look like when gravity does her thing and pleats their faces, back and forth finger-to-thumb, in wrinkles, and count where the light will hit them. We will share, over a sea of tea snacks, all those we have gotten to romance and how many universes sparkle within them, as I will watch all those pleats stretch upward toward their ears. I am so excited to fall in love romantically, with the world, and with myself over again and again shamelessly and unabashedly, and see prisms of light as softened as I. Isn’t it so precious that I was romanced so potently that it changed the way I see the world around me forever?

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