There are three men that I would leave my husband for in a heartbeat.
Yes, my husband knows. And yes, he subscribes to this newsletter, so I wouldn’t be sharing it here if he didn’t. This would be a pretty rough way to find out. But he’s pretty comfortable knowing that I’d run away with Tom Hardy, Ryan Gosling or former England rugby captain Chris Robshaw if they asked me to, given that a) he’s a fan of all of them (well, Tom and Chris, anyway) and can see where I’m coming from and b) the chances of me happening across any of them and them wanting to leave their respective (incredibly beautiful) wives to run away with me are slim to say the least. (Just to be clear - those are my words, not his. If you asked my husband, he’d probably say that Tom, Ryan and Chris would all be very lucky to have me if they ever had the chance. But I’m pretty sure he’s safe.)
The thing is, in my head, all three of them are perfect. The imaginary Tom Hardy that lives in my brain does not snore, he is never in a bad mood and he regularly professes his undying love to imaginary Allegra (who is a lot slimmer and younger-looking than this one) with poetic words and thoughtful gifts. I mean, he can afford it. This fantasy couple also don’t have two small children to contend with. They have kids, sometimes. I haven’t written my children out of the story altogether, but in my daydream world they either haven’t come along yet or, for various reasons, don’t need to be managed right now. There are no life stresses to deal with, no difficult or even mundane practicalities to handle. Everything is magical, all of the time.
Of course my real life relationship can’t compete with that.
The romance myth
One of my friends said to me once, “I really thought someone would have come and swept me off my feet by now.” I think about that a lot. I wonder how many people really get swept off their feet. I wonder how many people’s eyes meet across a crowded room and just know they’re meant to be together. I wonder how many people long for each other, deeply, painfully, and endure many ups and downs before finally getting together… or whether that’s just the plot of every Hollywood movie. Does life ever really play out like that, or do we just think that sounds more exciting than real life? After all, we don’t pay the £300 a pop it now costs to go to the cinema to watch reality - we want to be transported. We want to be taken out of our realistic lives and shown something altogether more perfect.
It happened to me, once, that my eyes met someone else’s across a room, and there was a spark, then intrigue, and then months - actually I think nearly two years - of chaos before we finally got together. This was not the man I married. It lasted only a few months once we actually started dating. The guy turned out to be a pathological liar - he told me some absolutely astonishing things, including that he had a rare genetic illness that would kill him before he turned 50 and that his father was a violent drug dealer, as well as some far more mundane things, all of which turned out to be complete fabrications. He was exciting, but very much not in a good way. It was thrilling for a while, I guess, but it quickly became boring and tedious. Hearing another wild story only to inwardly roll your eyes, sigh, and reply, “sure,” gets old quick. Knowing that nothing the other person has told you is real leaves you with a sense that everything is flimsy, a cardboard cut-out backdrop. That is not the kind of foundation on which you can build a lasting relationship.
The thing is, I think “excitement” in relationships is often code for “drama”. The romances I’ve had in the past that I would count as exciting have been fraught with anxiety. Passion that could lead us to fall into each other’s arms or stay up talking all night could just as easily take us into screaming rows. I never knew whether they would tell me they loved me or hated me; whether they would turn up at my door unexpectedly with flowers or disappear from my life altogether. Trust me, that is no way to live. It’s exhausting.
Unfortunately, Hollywood has primed us to expect that kind of relationship. The great romance movies are filled with those kinds of erratic and unpredictable affairs. The movie tropes tell us, if he acts like he hates you, then he’s really struggling with feeling too much love for you, and eventually he will be able to express it. But only after he breaks your heart a couple of times. If he gets angry, it’s because he cares. If he disappears, he’s afraid of his own feelings. If you can just weather that storm, eventually it will all work out.
I hate to break it to you, but that’s bullshit.
If someone is treating you poorly, that will never change. And most of what we see in romance movies is poor behaviour. It’s not romantic, it’s not passionate, it’s not exciting. It’s emotional abuse. But we’re sold it as an aspirational ideal. The patriarchy is pretty smart - since the first fairy tales were told, they’ve found a way to say, “hey girls, men are supposed to treat you like shit. This is what you want.” I’m afraid I swallowed it as much as the next woman. I believed for a long time that love equalled passion and drama and pain, and if you didn’t have those extreme emotions then you didn’t have anything meaningful.
Love vs romance
Life - real life, the kind you actually live - doesn’t fit neatly into a two-hour narrative. A love story on screen doesn’t contain any of the day-to-day requirements, irritations, comforts or boredom of a genuine human existence. People in movies rarely go to work or prepare meals, they don’t go to the toilet or brush their teeth, they have no need of vacuum cleaners or dusters, and no one ever, ever farts in bed. They have meaningful conversations where they are each allowed to deliver lengthy sentences without once being interrupted by a child, and they are never too tired to have sex.
Movie life is designed for an aesthetic. Even low income homes are sculpted with a shabby chic, vintage store charm that most of us would need to spend a small fortune to try to recreate. The people are always beautiful, wearing a full face of make-up even after swimming or taking a shower. It never rains, unless that’s for dramatic effect, and then everyone’s hair becomes dishevelled in a charming and sexy kind of way, never frizzy. It all looks stunning, but it’s not real.
The relationships it depicts are, also, not real. They’re an aesthetic. Love isn’t drama and bold declarations. That’s just window dressing. I read somewhere once that, despite the common movie trope of couples being brought together under dramatic circumstances and finding true love, in the real world, relationships that begin in a context of stress (like a war or imprisonment by a psychopath or an alien invasion) have a very low success rate. The feelings you develop in intense situations are unlikely to survive the mundanities of day-to-day life.
I spent a lot of time looking for love in all the wrong places. It actually pains me to think, in my teens and twenties, how desperate I was to find some great romance. I met a lot of people who fit that mould of complicated and brooding and emotionally unstable that I had come to believe signified deep, meaningful connection, and they all treated me like absolute crap. And I have to admit, I let them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking all the blame here - they were all messed up and flawed people, and some of them were total arseholes, but I was pretty messed up and flawed too. I didn’t always behave brilliantly. And I participated in the whole shit show for far too long. I could have walked away much earlier - I still run some of the scenarios through my head on occasion, wondering why on earth I didn’t. But I was convinced that there was supposed to be a Prince Charming who was going to come along and slay both of our dragons so that we could live happily ever after. It was supposed to be painful and dramatic, because it would be worth it in the end.
But wait, what end? Life doesn’t end until you die. The credits don’t roll while you’re still living it up on a beach somewhere. Life keeps on going, and going, day in and day out, until it doesn’t anymore and there’s nothing left. Any relationship you get into isn’t going to follow a narrative arc and then reach a pinnacle. It’s going to have to keep going and going with you, through all the normal unromantic stuff, and if it doesn’t then it will end way before you do.
It took me a long time to realise that passion doesn’t equal love, not necessarily. You can have passionate feelings for someone you truly love, but that passion isn’t likely to sustain its intensity forever. Passion can also equal fear - fear of losing the person, fear of actually being with them. It can be a side effect of feeling constantly on edge with them, of being on such a rollercoaster that you’ve lost control of your emotions.
The final rollercoaster relationship I had was the one that did it - that finally opened my eyes to how insane this narrative is. I spent 18 months with a man who constantly gaslit me, who would say something to me and then, sometimes within the hour, swear he had never said it and that I was making it up. He would constantly check up on where I was and who I was with, and even when I had proof that I was with friends he would still insist that I was lying and I had been with another man. He once tried to send me home alone from a holiday we were on because he was so enraged that I suggested doing something different to what he wanted to do. Most of the time that I was with him, I was terrified. It took me longer than I like to admit to realise that this was not what love was supposed to look like.
When I finally stepped away from that relationship, I said I was never going to get into another one. I was done with it all. Then, somehow, my husband turned up. He wasn’t dramatic and emotional, he didn’t make any big passionate declarations. He was calm, and reliable, and kind. He made it very clear that he really liked me and that he wanted to spend as much time with me as possible. I was baffled by the whole thing. I hadn’t known it was possible to date someone without playing games, without hiding what you really thought and carefully calculating the amount of time to wait in between text messages. It probably isn’t the most passionate relationship I have ever had, but it’s the one that has made me feel the most secure and safe, and loved.
He’s not perfect. He frequently farts in bed. But he’s always there for me. He’s always believed in me. He’s been by my side through all kinds of curve balls life has thrown. He’s been my drinking buddy when we were young and child-free, and he’s practically given up alcohol now that I’ve stopped drinking. He brought me lucozade and ginger biscuits when that’s all I could stomach, lying wretched on the sofa in my first trimester of pregnancy. He’s run out to buy me emergency tampons - the aforementioned pathological liar once refused to get me such things in case the person in the shop thought they were for him. He comes on crazy adventures with me - like when I dragged him out into the middle of nowhere to stand in the dark and cold for hours trying to see a meteor shower (we saw one meteor, but it was worth it), or when I wanted to take a road trip to the other side of the country just to go to a Substack meet-up - and he will also sit next to me on the sofa watching shit TV when I just want to unwind.
Physical attraction and that little shiver of excitement when you’re near someone is only a small part of the story. If you’re going to get through paying bills and making dinners and moving house and raising kids and building careers and following dreams and being ill and losing loved ones and all the other big and small elements of a life, you need something deep and solid and real.
Believing in dreams
Daydream lives are always better than our real lives - why else would we bother to dream about them? In my fantasy world, I’m slim with perfect hair and skin. I am a famous, multi-award-winning novelist. I can also sing beautifully. It’s a fantasy. The trouble starts when we compare the world we dream about with the one we live in. Reality will always come up short.
Ultimately, I’m not sure I would want to run away with Tom Hardy, or Ryan Gosling. I’m not sure I’d know what to do with either of them. They’re too perfect. I can’t imagine ever feeling relaxed in their presence - the pressure to be as sculpted and poised as they are (or appear to be) all the time makes me tired and tense just thinking about it. I can’t imagine admitting to wanting to binge watch all international series of Traitors in front of Ryan Gosling, or telling Chris Robshaw that I’d rather order a curry and stay up late than get up early the next morning to go for a run. I imagine that, after a little while of that, we’d get fed up of each other.
In actual fact, they’re probably not that perfect, but then they’d likely just be a massive disappointment. However piercing those eyes might be, they’d end up snoring and farting next to you just like anyone else.
The problem isn’t that real people can’t measure up to our expectations, it’s that we’ve been taught to look for something spectacular outside of ourselves. We’ve been conditioned to see romantic love as the ultimate goal - at least for women, I’m not sure it’s the same for men (let me know in the comments, fellas!). We’re encouraged to feel that the ultimate focus of our lives should be finding the one, that no achievement is enough if we don’t have someone to appreciate it with. Even the phrase “other half” implies you’re not complete unless you find another person to make you a whole.
Not only is it a pretty big denial of our sense of self, it’s way too much to expect from one person. Expecting any single human being to complete you, to make your life worth living, to make all your achievements and choices feel like they’ve led you to the right place, the summit of your existence… it’s a recipe for disaster. How can any mere mortal live up to that? Of course we then need to construct fantasy people to do the job.
The fact is, you’re already whole. You are a wonderful, complex, beautiful human who is on the adventure of a lifetime as you explore this incredible planet. We’re taught to look externally instead of cultivating a relationship with ourselves because, in a capitalist system, that’s good for business. You need other things, you need to make yourself palatable to other people, you need to be looking, always looking, because then you will buy stuff to fill the gaps. I’ve shared a few creative exercises in a previous post to kickstart some self-connection, but, like any good relationship, it needs ongoing dedication and attention. You need to commit to yourself, and show up for yourself daily. We also have a need to be seen, to be validated, and to be valued, and that is some of what we want from a relationship. But we won’t be able to access any external validation unless we approve of and value ourselves.
And those dream lives might be unattainable, but they tell us something about the life our soul is yearning for. I’m a famous novelist in my dreams because my deepest self would feel fulfilled by a life dedicated to full-time creativity (psst, you can sign up as a paid subscriber here and help me get closer to this dream!). Your fantasy life reveals a lot about the world you’re drawn to, the calling you feel deep inside, even if you’ve been trying to ignore it. Rather than focusing on how far away that life feels, why not consider what you could do, even in small ways, to begin to bridge the space, to move a few steps closer?
When you feel fulfilled in yourself, when you love yourself and are engaged in activities that nourish your soul, you don’t need someone else to make your life worth living. Any partner you find can be a companion on your human journey, and someone to share and enrich your experiences. But they’re not a necessity.
It’s not just self-love that makes romantic love easier, either. Sufi mystics believe that love is simply an expression of longing for the divine - romantic love is just an echo of our love of god. I don’t believe in god, but I can see how our need for love could be a misdirected expression of our need for belonging, for connection, for being part of something bigger than ourselves. As our societies have become more insular and disconnected, we’ve begun to pin that need all on one person, and - surprise - we haven’t really been able to find what we were looking for.
Maybe if we can stop expecting to find our passion and excitement in one other human, we can find it in ourselves and our relationship with the world - with the lives we’re living, with the communities we’re part of, with the planet we call home. Maybe we can direct that longing for a Prince Charming to come and rescue us into a drive to build connection and meaning all along the road we’re travelling. Then maybe that one person we find we like more than the others can make the journey more enjoyable.
The reality of my marriage can never live up to a fictional relationship with a perfect character I’ve constructed with a movie star’s face. The reality of living as a human will never match up to the fantasy existences we create in our heads. But the gap between the two tells us a little something about what we need - whether it’s that we’d like to have more time with our partner to talk, or we’d like them to break wind less, or we’re yearning to spend more of our time in creativity. And, above all, our desire for love tells us that we need to be part of something bigger, that there is a wider world out there that we want to connect with and on which we want to make our mark. If you’re not getting everything you want from one person, that’s ok - you were never meant to. Maybe they add value to your life, maybe they don’t. Only you can decide that. But the real sense of meaning - that you’re going to have to go out there and find for yourself.
Ryan gosling is beautiful and I would help you run to him. Hahaha !!
Brilliant piece. I've become more and more critical of the romance movies over the years, and am sometimes shocked at certain behaviour that is somehow considered acceptable and excusable in the name of romance. Plus, the stupid things - like, seriously, are women so clutzy that we're always falling off ladders, slipping on ice, breaking heels .... and magically landing in some guys arms? According to Hallmark movies and the like, women are and we would all have concussions and broken bones if men weren't around. I've come to think of these movies as a bit like "relationship porn" - unrealistic and unattainable..... and yet, I still watch them often. lol. Thanks for sharing your perspective, and affirming what the truth of a loving relationship actually looks like... finding a safe, supportive person who will inevitably fart in bed like any human being. Lol.