New Series on Romance, New Website, and Office Hours!

Lots and lots of exciting new things this week!

First, I’m going to be writing a series of newsletters on romance and romantic attraction.

We’ll be guided by the very articulate question: WTF is romance??

I’ve run all over the map on this one. I google “aromantic” about once every 6 months. I toggle between feeling extremely aromantic, and feeling like maybe “hyper-romantic” or “romantic but towards everyone” is actually more true.

There are many things about the way we do romance as a culture that confuse me, and there are things I think are beautiful and want to expand.

We’re going to think about what romantic love is, and what makes it different from erotic or platonic love. We’re going to look at how romance shows up in our cultural stories and expectations. We’re going to think with a critical and aromantic perspective. And we’re going to ask what about romantic love we want to keep, and what we want to change.

We’ll kick things off today with a dive into the dictionary.

I’ve been thinking for weeks about love stories—how the ones we’ve been given influence what we want in life, and what different kinds of love stories could look like—so I was thrilled and tickled to re-discover that the root of “romance” means “story”. The word “romance” comes from Latin and Old French, referring to the vernacular/”the people’s speech” and narratives composed in this tongue (Merriam-Webster).

Romance is a story. Romance is meaning-making.

This idea helps me clarify the other definitions of romance:

“a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.”

“a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love”

“love, especially when sentimental or idealized”

(all from Oxford Languages)

Stories are things we craft, things we can play with and be in relationship with. Romance is about turning our lives into stories, bringing excitement and a sense of something cosmic, something bigger than ourselves, into our everyday lives. The story of romance is something we can inhabit and change.

I think the question of romance is in part a question of where we see ourselves in our stories. Are we characters buffeted by the winds of fate, or are we also authors—potentially authors who want to tell new stories? What does it mean to be fully both an author and a character?

If you have also wandered through the maze of romantic confusion and have thoughts about what romance means to you or what you’d like to do differently—if you can tell me WTF romance is—I’d love to hear about it in a response to this email!

In other news, Creative Encounters now has a shiny new website!! This is my attempt to create a space where we can learn and think together about how to do relationships differently. I want it to feel like an art studio and like a science lab, where we can get our hands dirty, and experiment together.

And I’ll be holding the next Office Hours on May 13th, from 7:30-8:30pm EST. This is an open and free virtual space where you can drop in and chat with me and others about how to love differently! I think there’s so much genius in each of our perspectives around love, and I’ve really enjoyed creating spaces where we can share. Come join us! Here’s the Google Meets link, which you can also find on the new website.

Thank you for being a part of this newsletter and this space! I love you!