Confessions of a hopeful romantic
I’m single again on Valentine’s Day and have never felt more in love.
Just today: morning cuddles with my two big babies; the robin at breakfast, hopping along the frosted birdbath; a child carefully selecting the right red and pink Hallmark card; then, driving home, the komorebi through the woodland canopy, dappling the road in puddles of gold.
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Romance is not confined to coupledom.
It is a devotion to noticing.
I grew up in the UK in the 90s. In the circles I moved in, “girl power” meant the beer-swilling, dispassionate, sexually aggressive ladette. Softness felt like weakness. Romance felt naïve.
I nurtured my romantic heart through grunge melancholy, Victorian Gothic literature, and Pre-Raphaelite art. I filled journals with song lyrics, scraps of aching poetry (when poetry was niche and uncool), and the weepings of my unrequited heart. Those early fumblings gave way to pragmatism: a utilitarian approach to love as an ambitious single dating in Tokyo’s megalopolis. It wasn’t until I became a mother that my heart softened again.
When my daughter was born, my heart began living, unprotected, outside my body. Perspective returned to the minutiae: ants weaving between paving slabs; chubby fists grasping mango; the soft, milky breaths of earthbound angels.
In that vulnerable state, my marriage and other family relationships began to fracture. The love I had built my life upon was upturned. The inversion was total, tilting my reality. I began to question everything.
What is love? How had I gotten it so wrong?
So I read. Biology, psychology, philosophy, religion - anything that might illuminate the architecture and function of love. Was it genetic impulse, spiritual force, attachment pattern, divine current, or all of the above?
I did not find answers in books; The answer is in daily enquiry.
I started writing poetry again.
This time, it wasn’t just me.
In recent years, it has felt like a collective unhardening. Covid seemed to accelerate a global turning inward. Language for mental health entered the mainstream. Attention shifted back to the microcosm as people rebuilt their lives within the confines of homes and gardens. There was renewed appreciation for analogue rituals and human connection. Poetry returned with vigour. And more women seemed to be reclaiming and celebrating values long dismissed as soft, such as the cherishing and protection of humans and nature, collaboration, compassion, and embodied wisdom.
Neuroscientist and author (and fellow Scot) Dr Rachel Barr has predicted the coming of a new Romantic era: a cultural turning toward feeling, art, depth, and imagination after a long stretch of rationalism and mechanisation. It is a shift many of us can sense as current systems strain under their own sterility. Something more soulful, more holistic, more human is emerging.
romance
/rəʊˈmæns/
noun
A feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.
This is my religion.
It is the lens through which I choose to view life.
Even after it has undone me, again and again.
Especially after.
Happy Valentine’s Day — from me to you, today and every day.
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