Romance is a Quality of Presence

Last week, we talked about how romance is a story.

Romance is meaning-making.

Romance is how we organize and relate to a certain kind of high sensation: the high sensation that lives in mystery and excitement. Maybe it’s an electric, bodily charge, a feeling of alive-ness. Maybe it feels expansive and heart-opening. Maybe it’s a little overwhelming, and your body wants to contain it.

(It doesn’t totally matter what we label this high sensation— romantic attraction, eroticism, love, connection—and I think individual people and different cultures relate to and experience it differently. So for now, romance).

Romance as a story guides how and where this sensation flows. It tells us how to interpret these sensations and how we should act on them. The romance story we have now follows a very specific script: you meet someone, you feel a certain kind of high sensation, and if they feel it too, you date, and you escalate your relationship. You commit, you move in, you get married.

Even as we’re starting to disrupt this story— maybe there’s room to feel and do these things with more than one person, maybe you don’t have to get married— there’s still the idea that this kind of sensation is deeply important and that you should organize your life around it. You feel something that kicks off the beginning of a story. And you get both the excitement of the sensation, and the thrill of being in a story, of making meaning. A sense of importance.

This is great and beautiful. And it’s become a bit of a tyrannical story. It’s also extremely high stakes.

In the new way of relating, we’re de-coupling romance from its usual story.

I’ve started seeing romance as a quality of presence. The ability to be with high sensation, to court it, to hold it, and, instead of forcing it down a certain path, to listen to it (and to listen to ourselves) as it unfolds.

Romance feels like a unique presence that’s possible when I’m with another being— or many— and am open to listening and to being touched and changed by them. It’s the difference between catching up with a friend where you’re having a good time, but may walk away from it mostly the same vs. having a conversation where you are responding in the moment to what the other person is giving, allowing it to change you, and being deeply curious about their experience. Romance is being in the present moment with another person and being willing to let down your little separate-self barriers.

This means we can experience romance with a lot more people, including people we don’t want to “romantically commit” to. It means we’re taking away the story scaffolding of what comes after, and instead allowing a unique story to unfold. Romance might be a single conversation with someone you never interact with again by choice. Romance might be intentionally creating time in a friendship to have a candlelit dinner. Romance definitely can be sharing your art with someone.

Expanding where we’re comfortable cultivating and experiencing romance means changing the meaning we make from romance. Right now, I think most of us are only comfortable experiencing the sensations of romance with one or a few people because a) high sensation is a little scary, and b) because we’ve over-coupled romance and a certain kind of commitment. If we decouple romance and romantic commitment, what we’re left with isn’t fuckboy behavior or coldness, it’s a new ethics that can develop out of the potential for romance in every moment, with every person.

More on New Romance Ethics next time!