CHAPTER SEVEN: DECONSTRUCTING THE ROMANTIC FANTASY

this is more precisely a rant on the harm that the romantic fantasy causes

‘Romance is a fetish.’

Celeste Hirschman

Where does romance get in the way of deep and meaningful love? Where does romance spoil our chances at love? What is the difference between romance and love? How do we detangle all of our notions about romance and what love “should” be and look like from the very messy, complex realities of love? These are the questions for this chapter.

The romantic fantasy operates off, in large part, of the mythology of specialness. When we fall in love with another, and we are deep within the throes of the romantic fantasy, it feels like they are the only person in the world. We utter things like “you are the centre of my universe/world,” or “you are the ONLY one in the world for me.” We are enamoured with how special our love feels and how special we feel in love, and in this fantasy we commodify specialness.

Let’s face it. Sex and love are profitable. Sex and love are two commodities that we are incessantly sold through capitalism. We are told what we should want out of love and we are sold the romantic fantasy; in movies, in hallmark cards, in valentines day films. And now, through TikTok, instagram, YouTube, and social media - where it’s possible for people to post the big gestures, the beautiful flowers that your boyfriend got you, the romantic getaways and so on. In the show The Ultimatum, one participant gives her partner the feedback that the romantic gestures he did for her didn’t look like the ones done on TikTok. I don’t say this to shame her, or her boyfriend, but rather to say that social media, marketing, and all of the multiple messages that we get about love from the world on a daily basis impact us - and they impact our expectations, our desires and our deepest fantasies.

I have often gotten the feedback from partners that I am chronically discontented. That I am always naming what I am unhappy about, what is ‘wrong’ with the partnership, and what is less than satisfactory. I think part of this is because I believe intimacy is about being with me - as I am - not as you wish I might be. And I am not constantly happy, and content, with everything that my partners do. This does not fly in the romantic fantasy, which posits that we should be content with everything that our partners say, do, think, feel - and if we’re not, well then - they simply must not be ‘the one’.

Unfortunately, we have overcoupled love and romance. Overcoupling is a term that comes from the somatic world, and it means that we equate two things to be the same - or, in some part of our soma, overlap and attach two experiences that don’t necessarily inherently overlap. What does this mean? Well, take the example of love and romance. Love is something. Romance is something. But for many of us, love and romance are the same thing. We don’t differentiate love and romance - we believe that love is romance and romance is love.

But, to entertain another quantum reality, there may be a universe where another fetish - like dominance and submission and power exchange - were equated to love. In fact, we don’t even have to go search for some far out quantum reality - we find in many cultures that love has become overcoupled with dominance and submission because, for so many of us, love has lived side by side with experiences of dominance and submission, much like the child who is hit by their parents and then told to tell mommy and daddy how much they love them. And, as bell hooks reminds us, love cannot coexist in contexts of domination. Love - in action - or the work of love - cannot coexist in contexts of active and ongoing domination.

Overcoupling happens when we connect two experiences in our soma that are actually unrelated (or are only related for us through trauma) - and healing happens when we can uncouple these experiences and see them as distinct. When we do this with love and romance, we have the opportunity to see how we feel about and relate to love and romance separately.

But to unpack this further let’s start with: what is the romantic fantasy? For many of us, when we think about love we think about romance. We hold them as synonymous. We may think: “love means being the centre of my world, love means holding the specialness of our union, love means exclusivity, love means that you are my one and only - my one true love.” But we do not realize that this is the language of romance, and not necessarily love.

One of the easiest ways to think about the romantic fantasy is to think about the notion of our one true love. We are raised on this fantasy from the time that we are children. We see it in Disney movies and we see it in romantic comedies. Boy meets girl. Girl falls in love with boy. And they live happily ever after. The end. The romantic fantasy is specifically targeted at women - there are no two ways to go about this patriarchal truth. The Slumflower is one philosopher who speaks about this very poetically within her work. Women are sold the romantic fantasy while men are sold the fantasy of power, domination and capital. Women are told to strive for the feeling of love and in loveness above all else, men are told to strive to own, to conquer, to possess. It is no wonder we exist in the current landscape that we do.

The romantic fantasy shows up as we wonder if the cute person we met in the coffee shop is “the one,” or more insidiously when we refuse to leave our lover because - despite their poor behaviour towards us - they might be the one. I am becoming suspicious that the romantic fantasy has been cooked up in order to lure women into the grasp of men who will exploit them spiritually, emotionally and sexually, sucking up their life force in order to use it in the pursuit of money, capital, fame, status and power. No wonder so many women report feeling sick, tired and drained after being in a relationship with a man. Many women know the experience intimately of loving a man that has left them sick, that has extracted from them - consciously or unconsciously - intentionally or unintentionally - because unfortunately, under patriarchy, that is what men are taught to do.

Men are taught to be energetic vampires who prey on women’s erotic power in order to further their own earthly and material gains. Women need to be very aware - and cautious - of this. Under the allure of the romantic fantasy, we are taught to stay, endure, take and take and take. We are taught to take men’s bullshit as our own, to heal them, to mother them, to nurture them, and to exploit ourselves in the process because women, more than men, are taught that love is sacrificial. How rarely do we see men staying with women who they deem unattractive, abusive, mean or cold because “what if she is the one?”. I am not saying this never happens, but it happens far more rarely than we will hear women in objectively fucked up situations staying because of the myth of the one and our conditioned yearning for this kind of union.

The myth of the one is a construction of patriarchy to keep women chained to uninitiated and vampyric men. Women need to wake up to the reality of the romantic fantasy and how it has been spoon fed to us from a very young age in order to reclaim our power and our ability to make conscious and wise choices about who we love. Unfortunately for women this choice is one of the most important choices we can make because we are most likely to die at the hands of our intimate partners. In South Africa, and in many parts of the world, the leading cause of death of women is intimate partner violence. That means you are most likely to leave this world not from natural causes and old age, not from a car accident, not from an illness or disease, but because the man you have chosen to love is so possessed by the spirit of hatred, violence and domination that he has mistaken you for his property that he gets to punch or shatter and dispose of at will.

Within this context, it is crazy to me that we are not thinking about being more discerning in how we choose partners and in how we let men have access to us. It is also crazy to me that we are not being more discerning about the ways that the romantic fantasy sets us up to project “the one” onto men who have not even remotely begun to prove that they are “the one”. He is “the one” because he gave you a compliment? Because he has a twinkle in his eyes or gives you butterflies in your tummy? The butterflies feeling that we often associate with meeting “the one” is usually a strange and predictable mix of limerence, projection, and trauma bonding. When we feel that someone is “the one” somatically what is most often happening is that we feel that there is something familiar about them; something about them that reminds us of the parent that abandoned us or neglected us - or even more specifically, there is something about the dynamic (aka, the energy or the vibe between us) that is familiar.

Usually, it is not because they remind us of the present and attuned caretaker that we had (or did not have but longed for). Usually it is because there is something within that particular dynamic and energy that unconsciously and limbically reminds us of a familiar dynamic of abuse - neglect - abandonment - absence - or narcissism - that some part of you is trying to repair.

This in and of itself is a beautiful impulse - it is the impulse of all human beings which is the impulse to heal, the impulse to become whole, and the impulse to turn painful experiences of suffering into beautiful experiences of repair. So we choose partners who are similar to our troubled parents because we think that this time will be different. Unconsciously we believe that if we can have a positive relationship with this person who so closely resembles our absent parent or caregiver, we can heal that wound that still lingers inside of us.

We think: “my father was absent and never present, and here I am attracted to this person who sometimes gives me attention and sometimes pulls it away. But if I can just work hard enough, and be good enough, then maybe they will give me the attention that I never got from my father. Maybe this time it will be different.”

But in choosing a partner that so closely resembles our neglectful and troubled parent, 90% of the time we just end up retraumatizing our inner child and perpetuating the same trauma that we felt as a young human. We don’t experience the resolution we so long for. Instead, the pain and the wounding gets deeper and deeper. There is nothing wrong with this impulse, but we must learn to use our discernment in order to see when a partner is truly available to us and when we are simply being drawn into our own trauma with childlike hopes of resolving it with someone who was never fit to resolve it with us in the first place.