*everything* that’s considered romantic has been conditioned by society, it’s performative, like the emotion can be genuine but romantic *gestures* are a societal construct, chocolates, flowers, rings, there’s no inherent act of romance, the purest form of what is conceptualized as “romance” can probably be boiled down to emotion + intent, and the manifestation of that combo’s gonna be different for everyone
an action evoked from a feeling of adoration and the need to express it can be constrained by what society provides, but once it’s made irrelevant the meaning becomes tailored to those experiencing it; someone giving fancy chocolates to their s.o. because it’s ‘the thing to do’ can’t measure up to someone giving the chocolates because they know their s.o. thinks the boxes are nice and really likes hazelnut fillings, same gesture, but former lacks ‘inherent’ romance because romance isn’t ‘inherent’, the later has a standard approach but it goes beyond what’s considered ‘romantic’
Hello I am a big fan of Obstinaterixatrix’ Romance Meta and I’m just gonna add to this bc it’s a good post.
I feel like what makes the difference between something being romantic and something being What Society Says Is Romance is the connection between people.
Let’s say two people arrive on my doorstep. One of them has a bouquet of expensive roses from the florist. The other one has a dead bird in a plastic bag. We all know which one is to be considered the romantic gift (hint: it’s not the corpse)
And it’s not like I don’t like flowers or am allergic or anything, I would probably be flattered. But I have no connection to roses, and like, you can give roses to more or less anyone
Dead birds are not a standard gift, for pretty obvious reasons. A person bringing me a corpse in a plastic bag had to know me well enough to know that I collect bones and process them myself, and you don’t go shopping for birds in the Dead Bird Shop around the corner, so that means this person didn’t go out with the intent of getting me something and came back with an Appropriate Gift, they probably stumbled across something and thought about me (this ‘something’ just so happens to be a dead bird, because I’m weird)And then they had to go through the process of picking this bird up and bagging it and bringing it to me, probably pretty spontaneously and without a calendar event that says Find Dead Bird For Raptor with a timeslot between three and four pm.
You can’t have Corpse I Found In a Ditch be romantic without some sort of connection here. Roses can be romantic, but it can also just, be a formula. Two plos Two Equals Romance. A shortcut for ‘I care about you‘, even though the person might …. not, actually.
If it’s someone who loves fresh flowers in their home but rarely has the money to buy large arrangements, or like OP’s example where person A gets the chocolates because they know their s.o. thinks the boxes are super cute, then we have Standard Romantic Actions actually be romantic, but they might as well not be.
This is where my squad has the joke of someone posting a picture of a dead rat to the skype chat and goes ‘Raptor I saw this and thought of you‘ and I go -exaggerated gasping noise- “how dare you blatantly flirt with me right in front of my girlfriend“ from (and also THIS JOKE that bunch of people were confused about). Because there’s INTEREST and CONNECTION there. They’re obviosuly not actually trying to steal me from my gf, but there is a human connection and a knowledge of who I am and what I want to be associated with. The humor then comes in from the self-awareness that this could very much be the opposite of a compliment in, like, probably most other situations ever.
So TL;DR: Things can’t be romantic without the connection between people, no matter how ‘inherit‘ people claim the gesture is. However, more or less anything can be a romantic gesture if there’s the right connection and consideration behind it. Taking out the trash can be romantic. Bringing home a dead fox can be romantic. There’s no Romance Shortcuts. You have to actually care about the other person (sorry, Writers Of Like 9 Out Of 10 Mainstream Movies), there’s no way around it.
So basically: Care about each other!! If you’re writing, write characters who care about each other!! And if you don’t know what character A could do for character B, you might wanna look into whether or not you’ve made a Cardboard Love Interest, like I feel many mainstream writers do. But that’s a whooooole ‘nother can of worms.
There’s so many cans of worms.
Oh god there’s so many worms.
Please help.
I’ve wondered for a long time why so many fictional romances feel forced and this is the exact reason. So many main couples in media only express their love through performative romance.
This is also why a lot of platonic fictional relationships are seen as romantic because for some reason screenwriters have a habit of making friends express their love for each other with actual thought and intent to their actions.
acts of bravery that go underappreciated: – taking medication/seeing a professional – bringing up something that makes you anxious and talking through it – admitting you made a mistake – sending a message first – apologizing – standing up for yourself
I see your “romantic relationships shouldn’t be more important than platonic relationships” and raise you “romantic relationships shouldn’t be rooted in anything but strong, healthy, and mutually rewarding friendships anyways”
i haven’t stopped seeing notes for this since I posted it and I just wanna reiterate: it’s really important that you don’t get romantically involved with people you can’t be friends with. Separating a romantic relationship from a platonic context is unhealthy. Your romantic partner/s should always be your friend/s.
you know that trope in shows or movies where the evil character is in captivity and starts talking to the Heroes to try and mess with their minds, and starts analysing them going “face it you’ll never be good enough” … “you try to act tough but inside you’re broken” … and the Hero gets really rattled and upset.
well i want a scene like that where it doesn’t work
Villain: “You have a darkness inside of you. You try to hide it, but it’s there–”
Hero: “Yeah that’s the depression, there’s pills for that.”
Villain: “You try every day to make your mother proud. Even after death, it still haunts you. But she’ll never be proud of.”
Hero: “Well yeah, she was an emotionally abusive narcissist, she was never proud of anything I did, what else is new.”
Villain: “You put on a good show, but deep inside I know you don’t feel worthy.”
Hero: “I know, man, I’ve been trying to work on that in therapy.”
Like… give me characters who know they’re mentally ill and traumatised who can’t have it used against them because they’ve fully accepted it
Being female-assigned, female-presenting nonbinary on International Women’s Day just highlights how much our language fails people with liminal identities.
There aren’t easy words to describe people whose identities are tied together by our external experiences. We’ve got acronyms– FAAB or AFAB– to describe our physiology, but that feels blank and statistical, and assuming external experience is associated only with physiology is flawed and gender-essentialist in its own way. “Woman” and “female” both belong to people who share an internal identity I don’t share. Female-presenting centers the absence of identity, makes me feel as if the only way to describe myself is as an empty facade. Femme is inaccurate; femme is a word that belongs to a different type of identity that I don’t inhabit.
Self-describing “as a woman” not only erases my own nonbinary identity, but also does a great discredit to transgender women by suggesting that “woman” is a descriptor tied to physiology or external experience rather than identity or expression.
What we don’t have is a word that ties together all of us who share an external experience based on how we are perceived because of our gender assignment and/or perceived presentation. That’s not womanhood, not for all of us, and it’s not the only kind of womanhood. Womanhood, our understanding of womanhood, needs to belong both to women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned female and women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned male.
I share a kinship based on experience with both cis women and trans women, and some things I share more with cis women, and other things I share more with trans women, and some things I share with both and other things I share with neither. But we have no language that lets me relate simply and accurately, because my internal identity isn’t theirs, and we have words to describe internal identity, but none to describe experiencing the same things as a group without truly being part of that group– none that feel right, none that feel inclusive rather than sidelining ourselves by definition. And it makes it hard to claim and relate experiences, even in places where I feel welcome, without feeling in some way deceitful or erased.
I want a word to describe internal identity, another to describe physiology, another to describe external experience, because all of those are valid things to identify with and to talk about in regard to their commonalities, but it needs to be very clear in our language that they’re all different things, and that they’re not mutually inclusive in the way our society still generally implies they must be.
So, anyway. I’m feeling very much on the outside looking in, feeling strong solidarity but no way to express it with the words I’ve got access to. But thanks to all the women out there and all the people our world defines as women for being yourselves and for doing the work you do.
oh my fucking god, thank you for writing this. mom called to wish me a happy 8th of march this morning and i felt like a total fraud. on the other hand, women’s right to vote, to abortion, to contraception – in short, everything that concerns me as someone assigned female and with a ‘female’ on my ID still concerns me and will possibly concern me for a very long time.
that’s the problem you get if you generalise and scream how only women’s experiences are valid in feminism – what about people who get some of the women’s experiences because we are assigned female?
just moving along like everyone else 