#5. romance: a workshop 🌹
on working with our love objects
Oxford:
a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.
“in search of romance”
a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.
“the beauty and romance of the night”
One thing I return back to is the dream scene from Oklahoma! the musical. I have so much nostalgia for this movie, and can remember watching it with a childhood friend at her house all of the time. This scene struck me when I was a kid, and still strikes me now; the way they use dancers that resemble the real people to portray them in a dream is such a powerful choice to me. That’s how dreams feel — off-center, not-quite. Of course, this scene devolves into a nightmare, but I like to rewatch it just for the magic of the opening where Laurey sings “Out of My Dreams,” and then she gets to dance with the guy she loves while she sleeps. Cute.
Note that the definition of “romance” doesn’t even mention a giver of the romance. It’s a feeling “associated” with love, a “quality.” I love the sentiment of “mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.”
If you’re like me, and latched onto the escapism of relationships-as-goal at an early age, you probably became very used to seeing romance as something distant that requires external parties to make up their minds about you. This demands a lot of waiting, a lot of management of extreme feelings that depend on your chosen love object, and a lot of strangling of energy ( ie) manipulation of the Self and Other).
You probably tried to devise strategies to ‘get’ a person to give you the romance you desired. You may have tried to force romance into a scientific formula like I have.
Side-note, one realization I had this week — when you’re classically needy, for lack of a better word, there’s a very clear picture of desperation and insecurity that is painted. But what about when you have practiced and rehearsed restraint in order to get what you want from a person? Is there not a kind of desperation here also? Both are manipulations of an energy that should be flowing. Anyway.
I think that when we desire romance from somebody, we haven’t excited or surprised ourselves in a very long time. An ideal date with an ideal person would be awesome, but if that isn’t accessible to you in this moment, or if you don’t really date just for the basic act of dating, ask yourself what qualities of life you’re wanting — excitement, magic, mystery — and why those qualities are seemingly absent in your life right now. Because you can endlessly channel excitement, magic, and mystery today, and you can make this an ongoing, daily, dynamic practice.
The beauty and romance of the night.
I’m really drawn to romance, non-specific to a literal love story. It makes me think of Elizabeth Bennett going on long walks. It makes me think of Amélie sticking her hand in a vat of dry grain. It makes me think of Brandy in Cinderella singing “In My Own Little Corner.” Or, for something more topical, Ariel singing “Part of Your World.” There’s actually something really lovely about characters in a movie before they’ve met their eventual suitor. Romance is very obviously still with them (and us) before ever falling in love with a person.
It’s not just romance that is a vibration but isn’t a person, it’s everything. There are so many ways to channel a vibration that don’t have anything to do with someone giving it to you. And, if you’ve found yourself hooked to a love object, it’s important to recognize its illusory qualities. Romance does not begin and end with this person, and our obsession with a person can be transmuted into other outlets, oftentimes more easily than you’d believe.
If you and I are close, you probably know how much I love and adore Gabi Abrão of sighswoon. She always describes romance as a medium, a means by which something is created or expressed. It’s something we can enjoy, have fun with, and tap into, along with a host of other mediums. Thinking of romance as a medium has softened the way I have given over so much power to one single person, because they are just one of many unique channels through which I can express romance.
So far in my life, my love objects have come and gone, and have been quite impermanent. This won’t always be the case, and for now, I’m leaning into the way I can create or express something with someone for any period of time (it is NOT EASY, it is a PRACTICE).
And it’s training me (or boot-camping me…) in one of our most difficult (if not the most difficult) lessons in human life — everything is ephemeral, and we don’t have any control over others.
Do you want to be obsessed with the mortal, fickle, ephemeral object? Or with the immortal, reliable, endless energy?
I choose to love very much the mortal, fickle, ephemeral object, but to devote myself to and worship the immortal, reliable, endless energy.
K xx
