On a broad scale I think you're probably more correct than not, but I do think you're leaving out one important distinction. In your fictional Pornlandia, the kids only see porn. They don't see non-porn sex. In our real-life Romancelandia, a pretty decent chunk (though certainly not all) of the kid population sees their parents interact with each other (or other non-parent partners). Some live through divorce, some see their parents succeed or fail with other people. If you have friends nearby, maybe you get to see their parents interact mundanely. That exposure to the everyday can't be discounted, even if our romance narratives can be overly rosy.
It's true that one of the benefits of romance not being stigmatized is that you get to see other people doing it in action more. I think:
1. This is also true for sex, people would be benefitted by seeing other people do it more
2. Porn does feature some realistic sex
3. I think you actually see less romance than you think. Lots of sexual foreplay is visible to outsiders (making out in parks, sexual joking), whereas a lot of the core of romance is not visible. My most romantic moments have happened with just me and the other person, it usually feels uncomfortable to put it on display, you know?
4. And even *then*, much of the romance that is visible is also heavily influenced by our romantic narratives. You do the kneeling proposal in the park and everyone cheers, you do the salient thing like getting her jewelry from the shop everyone gets jewelry from so that you are visibly partaking in a known romantic narrative, etc.
Where are you drawing the line between sexual foreplay and romance? Because you've implied that kissing in the park is sexual foreplay, but not the 'core of romance'.
I think it would be beneficial for you to pin down exactly what you mean by romance. Do you mean non-sexual intimacy? In which case, how do you distinguish between intense platonic friendships and infatuation?
My best guess is that you're referring to a pretty narrow band of interactions that I typically associate with the word 'courtship', but I don't want to be presumptuous. I'd definitely appreciate some clarification, though, because I'm struggling to form a coherent model of your views right now.
(EDIT: Full transparency here—I'm somewhat suspicious that you've gone and defined romance in a circular way, such that all of your observations about it are definitionally and trivially true (i.e. romance is all that stuff involved in performative, idealized courtship). So, I'd like to know what falls under the umbrella of romance for you that doesn't resemble those staid tropes, I guess, that we should be exposing our children to.)
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core romance"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
You can differentiate between foreplay and sex based on biochemical payload delivery. The same is true with romance, but the chemicals are a little different. One of the great human disconnects is that the same behaviors that trigger romance payoff are just sex foreplay.
> people would be benefitted by seeing other people do it more
Keeping in mind that we're talking about *kids'* exposure to sex, what in the world would this look like?
If you're advocating for the legalization and destigmatization of porn use among kids, then we're back to the problem of most porn being a poor representation of sex. Did you have something else in mind?
When my parents tell me stories about how they had a nice date, I literally can't believe them -- they ask very differently with me around. There's no romance at all
That's a fair point, but I also think Aella has a very good point. Unrealistic expectations of what a relationship is lead to a lot of people being very disillusioned with love. Despite what they saw at home, or among their friends, a lot of people still expect things to be different for THEM.
Behavioural scientist Logan Ury calls these people "Romantizers" and "Maximizers" (people with unrealistic expectations of their relationships and their partners, respectively). It is a recognised and real condition. Romantic love has only existed for a few hundred years. Before then people did not expect it... but now we do.
Very few people look to their parent's lives and want exactly what they had. They're busy being parents, leading responsible lives, surviving parenthood, but when we look at what we want from our OWN lives, we expect more...
So I think there's a lot more truth in Aella's post than I think you're giving her credit for.
Romantic love has definitely not only existed for a few hundred years. Have you ever heard of the Iliad or the Odyssey? Caesar, Antony, and Cleopatra? Orpheus and Eurydice? Abelard and Heloise? Hadrian and Antinous? Plato's Symposium? Dante's Inferno?
Most of those stories were written and received as TRAGEDIES, and the rest weren't even romantic (Caesar and Cleopatra? Symposium?). There is nothing laudable about the story of Helen of Troy -- the resultant destruction of Troy was the most barbaric act in human history at that point. Odysseus slept with other women on his way back home -- and it was his HOME he longed for, not simply Penelope.
The idea that you should marry the person you fall in love with, and the infatuation with love as being something meaningful and healthy, is a modern invention. An idea that all of the stories you've quoted support.
What you said was that romantic love has only existed for a few hundred years. I agree that love marriages were historically not the default and infatuation was often viewed as dangerous, but that is a completely different claim from the one you originally made.
What you said was that romantic love has only existed for a few hundred years. I agree that love marriages were historically not the default and infatuation was often viewed as dangerous, but that is a completely different claim from the one you originally made.
But a lot of porn is what you would call a "non-porn sex". Like, no anal reamings, no twenty black guys with gigantic cocks or something, no choking and face-cumming, just him and her making out, going through ten minutes of fairly tame foreplay and then doing a usual vaginal intercourse. Sure, with positions that look better for video, but still, not something you'd have trouble repeating in your own bedroom. There's like whole genres that are basically just sex, no kink.
Do yourself a favor. Go to PornHub and sort by the most watched videos of all time. Most people are not watching ten minutes of "fairly tame foreplay".
“Most watched videos“ <> “Staple videos people regularly fap to“. To get to the most watched, a video must contain some extra strong attention-grabbing ingredients in it, it’s not necessarily what the user watches 90% of his time.
Also, there are a lot of staple, always-there, quietly money making categories in porn that are not so attention-grabbing, but are preferred by a lot of people and are at least occasionally watched by pretty much everyone. Examples:
“For women“ - vanilla sex with extended foreplay and a lot of kissing and tenderness. Funnily enough, watched much more by males.
“My stepsister/stepmother…“ - vanilla sex where most of the times all of the kink is contained in the title of the scene and maybe a short dialogue before sex starts.
“Cheating“ - same as stepsister, “Cuckold“ - often vanilla with an addition of a passive male actor who watches the scene.
“Amateur“ - half of it is vanilla, again, most kink is in the assumption that the actors are not professionals. And so on.
So, a very good-sized (and well-watched, but not discussed by most people, because it’s not outrageous and attention-grabbing) sector of porn rests on filming what is basically a fairly regular sex act and spicing it up with an assumption that actors are transgressing somehow (note the word transgressing - NOT being normal, that’s the very point, otherwise the extra titillation would be lost), with said transgression quite often contained in nothing but the name of the scene or the category tag (no, for the stepsis videos they do not actually go searching for actors that are step-siblings IRL, sorry if that burst anyone’s expectations and/or ruined anyone’s next orgasm).
Even the “virgin” movies star actresses with twenty tattoos and six piercings and who obviously have at least double digit body counts, again it’s mostly in the preliminary conversation
Uhuh, the most watched videos are not the most watched videos. Stellar logic there, my friend 👍
I suppose the most watched movies of the year are not the movies most people watch. The most listened to songs are not the songs most people listen to. And the most played video games are not the games most players play. Shrug
Think of if this way: Oppa Gangnam Style is among the most watched music videos like, ever. I’ve seen it, you’ve probably seen it, everyone has seen it. However, how many people do you know who listen to it daily or have it in their favorite tracks list or even like that sort of music? Or, if that person's girlfriend asked them to sing her a song - would it be Oppa? I personally do not know a single such person (fine, I do know one K-pop fan, that's probably the closest it gets).
Or, if we are talking about porn, goatse. cx . The whole internet has seen the fucking thing, there's like a million call-outs to it in the culture if you know how to look. Do you know anyone who actually, you know, faps to that?
When Gangnam Style was racking up its views, it was because people WERE listening to it on a daily basis. It was being played by LOTS and LOTS of people regularly. It wasn’t just a meme, it was a hit. But either way, go look at the most viewed videos for the week or month if you’re still not convinced.
But Yossi - how would a kid know the difference? The point is that older folks know why and how a certain narrative is an idealised fantasy only because they lived decades or more experiencing reality. This is the purpose of the warnings and labels.
Idk. For me somehow it seemed definitely rather obvious even at my teenager virgin years that, for example, expecting that your partner would enjoy putting a large eggplant in her ass, is not realistic, even without experiencing it personally (and that porn is something better done by professionals, not in your home bedroom). However, the whole adult romance mystery is much less obviously unreal.
>>older folks know why and how a certain narrative is an idealised fantasy only because they lived decades or more experiencing reality.
p.s. exactly that. It doesn't take "decades of experiencing reality" to know whether you enjoy a sex position or find it painful. It takes one trial, well, at most, several, and some are very obviously not something you'd want to try, even if it's exciting to jack off to. It, however, does indeed take decades of experiencing reality to see the twists in romance.
If you want to see it there are enough people out there who are into exhibition -- or you can go to a sex club -- and really quickly get hit with the cold water of reality. The fact that people seem to kinda know this suggests to me they realize the level of unreality.
I don't think it's correct to blame insane teenage romantic gestures on media. I think most of the insanity of teenagers has to do with the physical flood of hormones teenagers experience. Trans people or others who change their hormone balance later in life often have a very similar period, where they temporarily experience extreme levels of emotion especially around sex and romance..
When I started taking hormones in my late 20s, I had a 2-3 year period of "teenage love." I would fall in love for objectively poor reasons and feel driven to do objectively insane things for the person I was in love with. After a few years of being on hormones steadily, this just stopped on its own and my life got a lot more balanced. I don't think my media consumption pattern affected this at all, it was a physical reaction. The way teenagers act during puberty feels similar to this. The sheer strength of the emotion comes from the physical hormone balance, and maybe a few of the specific expressions of it being shaped by their media and social environment.
And I do think it's important for children to learn some kind of romance norms from early on. It's a very complex social structure, and just following your instincts around romance as a young person can get you into a terrible place. I think a certain percentage of charismatic high-agency people can do better in a world without any norms about flowers and tablecloths, but a more average person would probably struggle. They won't know what they like or want, when to initiate or when they're being initiated on, how to be safe, or how to progress a relationship forward or cut it off when they want to. Having simple and near-universal symbols and rituals available for anyone to use (flowers = romantic initiation) seems very useful for people who aren't prepared to blaze their own path in the romance world.
Romance norms provide a kind of training and structure, and I'd be wary of the impacts of kicking that structure away from people who need it.
I agree it is good for kids to learn some things around romance, in the same way they should learn things around sex!
I also agree that teen romance is downstream of hormones. So is teen sex. My point is not that the experience of the infatuation drug is manufactured, but rather that our infatuation narratives are taking advantage of an extremely potent innate experience.
What Disney sells are not norms, Disney peddles fantasies. Oh, and plastic toys. Lots of plastic toys. You might as well suggest that children should learn appropriate hygiene from a shampoo commercial as valorize the romantic "norms" in Disney movies. Yes, children and teens need to learn social norms, absolutely. From actual human beings who have successfully navigated the landscape. Absorbing toxic pseudo-norms from media is not beneficial to anyone but advertisers. Nobody needs to grow up expecting love at first sight, or that "one true love" is a thing, especially one to wait around for, or that fixating for years on a person you used to date is healthy.
I don't think modern Disney movies are actually selling a "one true love" norm in a meaningful way. Disney movies have increasingly focused on emphasizing that romance isn't everything and that you (the presumed female teenager) should exercise good sense and judgment about such matters. The most influential Disney movie among young girls in the last ~20 years is probably Frozen, which explicitly calls out love at first sight as being a bad idea and the source of the central plot problem for the main characters.
I do think societal norms will always be conveyed through stories in part, because that's just how humans work. When you're a child, you absorb things through listening to adults, but also through the bright colors and clear narratives of myth. I think Disney does a pretty good job in this regard, and if anything the common complaint modern Disney would get would likely be the conservative critique - that they're too Woke and don't put enough emphasis on successfully Producing the Couple, focusing instead on the myriad dangers of teenage relationships.
We seem to be at cross purposes. The "one true love" trope does not claim that romance is everything. It is the myth that there exists exactly one person who is your "true" love and that this person will exactly fit and completely meet all of your romantic needs, and vice versa. Anyone who does not precisely fulfill your needs, wants, and expectations is not your "true" love, so you need to keep looking, not unlike the prince seeking the one foot that will fit Cinderella's glass slipper. And insofar as Disney films are focusing on romance at all (and not all do or ever did) I think they're still peddling that myth.
Interesting that in FROZEN you appear to conflate "love at first sight" with "one true love" -- yes, it is critical of the former, but it seems to me that it's still firmly in the camp of the latter, recognizing that Hans was not Anna's "one true love" after all, but suggests that Kristoff might be.
And yes, myth and story are part of how humans learn. But an important difference in the degree to which Disney and other media are likely to distort and deform kids/teens expectations and implicit beliefs about love and romance (and other social institutions) compared to previous generations comes down to the massive increase in kids' screen time, both absolute and relative to in person social engagement. When kids saw Disney films maybe two or three times a year, in a movie theater, and watched cartoons for an hour or two after school, and spent much of their social lives playing with their friends outdoors, the net influence of media was necessarily a lot less. Now parents hand their toddlers an iPad to watch movies to keep them quiet and distracted, and give smart phones to children still in grade school. The screen time dominates their lives.
OK, Disney memetics are harmful in a variety of ways, and I'm sure we all appreciate the easy rhetorical symmetry of "Romcoms are just like porn for women." But it seems like a wildly false equivalency to ground this argument in the claim that expecting your wife to fake pleasure while you cum on her face is just exactly like expecting your husband to occasionally buy you flowers.
Paying $15 for some flowers you don't personally enjoy is in no way the hedonic equivalent to having someone else smear their sticky, strong-smelling bodily fluid over the most identity-aligned part of your body, in a culture where having a dirty or disordered face is universally regarded as humiliating.
You can test the hedonic non-equivalence with some thought experiments. For example, buying gifts to please others is so status-enhancing that wealthy people often performatively make charitable donations to enhance their prestige. By contrast, no PR person ever recommended that their client enhance their public reputation by getting publicly drizzled with another adult's body goo. The spouses I know who enjoy romantic gifts of flowers, would also gladly buy flowers for their partner on request. But I doubt most bukkake fans would be willing to have their own faces arbitrarily smeared with cum, or menstrual blood, or snot, to please a partner, unless they had a pre-existing fetish that way themselves.
Really, instead of defaulting to "it's all the same," it's interesting to itemize exactly what are the harmfully over-the-top relationship expectations supposedly being inculcated in romantic media. Disney princes... what, willingly aid princesses when they're in physical danger? Share their resources with princesses? Give up some (literally never all) of their time to help princesses with quests and projects, on the way to the altar?
Thinking through other classic romcoms like _The Notebook_, heroes conventionally... listen to the heroine and sympathize when she's upset? Have a few tastes in common with her and enjoy talking with her, or spending time together in nature? Think she's pretty, smart and special, and sometimes compliment her? Stay faithful to her for (implied to be) many years after initial infatuation, and continue to care for her in illness or old age? All of these, again, seem like fairly modest, pragmatic and realistic expectations to have of a partner if you're a monogamous person entering a relationship that may lead to pregnancy and joint childrearing.
What are examples of media romantic expectations that are the equivalent of porn memes like "a good sexual partner will be a dumb submissive bimbo with crossed eyes and her tongue out, mind empty no thoughts" or "a good sexual partner will love it when I choke her, spank her, slap her, ram her up the ass"? Much less "a good sexual partner is my stepsister, stuck in a washing machine and unable to escape while I forcibly and transgressively have my way with her"?
Seriously this was perhaps the worst analogy imaginable. I purchase flowers for my mother and sister and mother-in-law on mother's day. I send flowers to people to express sympathy or congratulations. It's universally considered a nice gesture indicating you care about someone.
Tarnishing someone's face is universally understood as degrading, dishonorable, and humiliating, hence the commonly used idoms "mud on your face" or "spit in your face". I'd love to see anyone walk up and smear even something non-offensive like peanut butter on their parent's or boss's face. No one would. You could give flowers to any stranger on the street and they'd thank you.
She's comparing a boyfriend's desire to do something universally understood as a degrading and humiliating offense to something universally understood as a gesture of kindness and goodwill, and acting as if they're equivalent. I like Aella and most of what she writes but I frankly finding the equivalency being drawn here to be appalling.
You make a good point about porn being the more extreme example. I agree, Aella likely doesn't because she's one of the ones that enjoys extreme sex.
The issue with romance on TV is that it doesn't really show people how to live their own lives. It's like picking a meal at a restaurant rather than learning to make food at home with the twelve ingredients you have, two of which are starting to turn. People have the implicit expectation that they can just choose, and find, the story they want instead of slowly building their own. And you need to build your own because restaurants don't exist.
Yeah you're absolutely right about the poor quality of the comparison. The sexual acts in porn are usually much more explicit, extreme, invasive, and physically harmful.
Part of that is because much of sex and porn takes place in a visual or physical medium, and acts in those realms there are going to by default be more legibly extreme. By comparison, romantic acts largely tend to take place in the more subtle emotional and psychological realms.
I don't think Aella is condemning all romantic narratives (just like she isn't condemning all sex or porn.)
Instead, she's pointing to the elements of a specific kind of romantic extremism in the examples she gave: the self-centeredness, the main character syndrome, the pursuit of a romantic context without regard to the consent of the participation of the other, the invasiveness, and the emotional desensitization.
Where Aella has more of an actual argument is in the similarity of the mechanisms. Both fantasy worlds are built by similar means, and produce unreal expectations that can be dehumanizing and harm our relationships with others.
With sexual extremism, the dehumanization is familiar: the reduction of someone to a sexual object receiving or performing acts, without regard to their consent or humanity.
With romantic extremism, the dehumanization is actually pretty similar, but more so comes from forgetting that the fantasy (whatever ideals we've constructed it from) doesn't come for free: any approximation of the fantasy has to be built and co-created with another person, and the process to fulfilling and maintaining it will be much less linear and frictionless. They aren't merely a puppet fulfilling your romantic desires, but their own person.
In this extremism, the other person ceases to be fully human. Their actions become entirely dictated through the lens of whether or not they align with your fantasy, and there's much less room for their own emotions, flaws, preferences, and ignorance.
Instead, at best, they become a character that is refusing to play their part. At worst they are actively, intentionally, and maliciously denying and hurting you.
And much like actual porn, it also desensitizes you: because you're calibrated relative to the extreme, there's much less pleasantry and enjoyment to be derived from the process of achieving a shared fantasy. Everything becomes about arrival, rather than the intimacy of the joint journey.
I agree that contemporary romance fiction promotes a narcissistic "main character" outlook, although in my experience the dehumanization shows up less within the actual courtship plotline and much more with respect to secondary characters. Rivals, friends, parents, and exes in these books definitely *are* all just narratively convenient props, there to be cartoonishly mean so the heroine can be embattled, or to be prettier/richer but then suffer various terrible misfortunes so she can enjoy schadenfreude, or to be beloved and die so the heroine can have a melancholy past, or to deliver lame speeches of affirmation and forgiveness when she's behaved in morally questionable ways.
By contrast, I actually don't know many romances where the Prince Charming is put through any kind of crazy suffering or sacrifice to win the girl, or even where he's made to act in ways contrary to normal self-interest, beyond being expected to be physically/ emotionally protective and show ardent interest. Perhaps it's important for the status-enhancing features of the Prince that he be healthy, sane and fully agentic, so that it can be authentically flattering when he chooses the Main Girl?
I'm sure there's issues with the plots of a lot of romance stories, but I don't really think they're the primary issue themselves. Any of us can point to a lot of aspects of certain modern romance sub-genres that are questionable (you named several) but what genres don't have that anyways — let he without sin cast the first stone, and all that.
My concern is more what happens when real people in the real world see themselves as the center of idealized romantic narrative and destiny, and the way people who aren't them — the main character — can be flattened and lose complexity in pursuit of that destiny.
I personally think the issue is less with romantic media and more... the culture romantically extremist outcomes they *can* contribute to, if that makes sense
Sure, seeing yourself as "the center of an idealized romantic narrative and destiny" is an extremely real problem, but is it arguably just a problem with all novel-like media, full stop? Literary scholarship pointed out decades ago that the classic Luke Skywalker coming-of-age journey and the adorkable outcast heroine falling for Prince Charming are both secularized variants of the Protestant conversion narrative, the Pilgrim's Progress where you stumble through misunderstandings with the world until you realize your own election: all you needed was to follow your own inner light of grace all along. It *is* a bit self-absorbed, because you're saved by faith, not works: there's nobody else really there except the soul and God.
On the other hand, the atomized hero following their own lonely destiny, accountable to their inner vision alone, canonized by a faceless God from above because nobody else really exists except as set-dressing, is sort of the orthodox model for modern selfhood, isn't it? What psychologically rich narratives do we have that promote anything else? Even the most collective team sports, friends, band or war story is going to eventually pull in to center on the protagonist alone with their convictions and their own emerging character.
> Sure, seeing yourself as "the center of an idealized romantic narrative and destiny" is an extremely real problem, but is it arguably just a problem with all novel-like media, full stop?
I think you're spot on.
I will say that I think what distinguishes some narratives from others is that, depending on the culture, we may or may not have beliefs or narratives as part of that culture that ensure we as individuals develop more balanced, well-adjusted perspectives about ourselves and the world around us.
Some narratives have that quality naturally: they're so obviously exaggerated, unreal, and unattainable that it's difficult to absorb them as-is. Other narratives are more insidious, and you actually need the presence of sufficiently contrasting and grounding counter-narratives.
(By the way, I appreciate your trip down "how are we just repackaging older religious tendencies in new dressing?" Always a fun ride.)
Whether these are false equivalency really just comes down to taste. As someone else noted, Aella (and some other people) actually _like_ some of the stuff done in porn that you consider way out of bounds (heck, some people like the smell and taste of cum; also, pineapple juice helps!)
But romcoms/Disney are harmful not just because of what they show but what they do not, such as much of real life relationships being about the very much unsexy and not-at-all romantic parts of dealing with differing expectations, various differences, the kids, outside stressors, etc. Porn obviously doesn't show that either, but I'm going to hazard a guess that more people are more misled in to thinking that romcoms and Disney are closer to reality than that porn is.
All narrative, by necessity, leaves out gritty practical details, though. Sports stories leave out most of the actual training, plus days of boring travel, the grind of minor injuries. War movies mostly leave out trench foot and grinding daily discomfort and the minutiae of fighting with your buddy over some minor thing.
Focusing, pruning, and sanitizing and soft-focusing are a normal part of storytelling about anything. But that's meaningfully different from presenting a fundamentally false or harmful view of the human relationship you're depicting.
Porn, as a form of storytelling, also does its fair share of romanticizing by omitting practical realities. For instance, it deliberately leaves out the normal sex experiences of smegma, women's pubic hair (!!), enemas, lube, erection drugs, blood from periods starting unexpectedly, laundering sticky or shit-stained sheets, B.O. and related unsavory scents, farts and queefs and vomit, flappy/unflattering angles, condoms or birth control and side effects, getting cold or tired, plus the messiness of negotiating plans, getting tested or treated for STDs, gaining consent, dealing with pregnancy or aborting the baby, etc.
However, when people say that porn conditions a harmful and anti-human approach to sex, they're not talking about porn leaving out messy details about queefing and B.O.
Messages like *"It's sexy when you treat a woman violently or degradingly, gum up her face, eyes and hair with your cum, call her insulting names, remove her human agency by choking or restraining or hitting or outnumbering her, shove your dick forcefully in her unlubed orifices with no pleasure receptors, talk lustfully about DESTROYING all her HOLES.... a good woman will enjoy all this, because that's what women are for!"*, those messages are harmfully wrong in *content*, and that's true no matter how many women catch onto the message and get either socially conditioned or (as with Aella) traumatically induced to try to regain agency by actively pursuing sex that degrades and hurts.
Being false at the core, in a harmful direction, seems vastly different from being directionally true but overly sanitized.
(Edit: unless the point actually was that "Good men admire and pay attention to the women they love, and want to protect and help them even at some cost to themselves" is also directionally false, because in reality men don't want any of those things and hate having to pretend? On some level, that's the vibe I'm reading from the original article's claim that buying flowers for your wife on Valentine's is the same as being gang-raped, or whatever.)
I thought of a concrete, positive answer to your question of the romantic equivalent of problematic porn tropes, and I'd like to get your take on it.
I think that a lot of romantic fiction, especially literature, teaches women that they can read minds. I gave a detailed, hypothetical example of this in a comment from several months ago:
Lines like "his eyes darted to the side, betraying his insecurity" are convenient for conveying exposition and establishing the main character's competence, even though they're ridiculous leaps in reasoning.
For an example of how this toxifies real women's behavior, consider the scrutiny that Erika Kirk received after the recent assassination attempt against Trump. Much of it consists of wild speculation on the basis of her body cues. For example:
I've heard some people attribute this behavior to the true crime genre, instead, but I associate it more with romance. (Admittedly, I don't consume much of either, but I think we're all shooting from the hip with respect to the media we're critiquing.)
>Lines like "his eyes darted to the side, betraying his insecurity" are convenient for conveying exposition and establishing the main character's competence, even though they're ridiculous leaps in reasoning.
Lines like that are just how bad writing works in a story that needs some interiority, though-- nothing specific to romance fiction. Given a scene where you need to establish complex or evolving motivations, a good writer will find a way to _show_ the feeling through some nuance of dialogue or action, but a bad writer cranking out genre fiction will take the lazy way out and just tell you the twist of their mouth indicated sardonic joy, or whatever.
Here's an example from Jack London, a Boy's Own writer if ever there was one, in a story with no romance or female characters whatsoever. London is a decent writer, so the emotional tell-don't-show is a bit milder, but it's recognizably the same mind-reading pattern:
> He had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent voice, gentle-spoken as a maid’s, seemed the placid embodiment of some deep-seated melancholy. He was the Leopard Man, but he did not look it. His business in life, whereby he lived, was to appear in a cage of performing leopards before vast audiences...
I suspect this kind of direct narration of feelings gets linked to romance and crime fiction because romance and crime stories are frequently low-quality and mass-produced by people not bothering to write well. But I'm not seeing how the move is central to the romcom genre. Romcom films rarely if ever do this kind of explicit inference, for instance, and I don't recall Disney featuring it at all.
I agree that it's bad writing. Good romance respects the limits of what people can actually infer about each other. Similarly, good porn respects the limits of what people (including women) are actually aroused by.
That said, I don't think that "it's just bad writing" absolves the romance genre of this criticism. As Sturgeon's saying goes, "90% of everything is crap". A genre's characteristic flaws are common enough to affect people's behavior even though the best examples of that genre don't contain those flaws.
Additionally, I do think it's fair to label mind-reading as a characteristic flaw of romance, given that the genre disproportionately focuses on characters' interpersonal feelings.
Finally, I acknowledge that my point is limited to written mediums. I don't claim that mind-reading is *the* problem with Romancelandia, only that it's *a* problem. For example, the point that I raised in my other comment--the systematic replacement of calm, mundane conversations with grand gestures and harsh quarrels--also applies to film.
> What are examples of media romantic expectations that are the equivalent of porn memes
That's a great line of inquiry. Similar to Richard's point, I think that most of the romantic genre's sins are those of omission, not commission.
In particular, romantic stories do not depict effective ways of working through interpersonal problems. In real life, it requires lots of calm conversation about mundane subjects. By definition, that doesn't evoke strong emotions, so it's a chore to watch and to read, and so it's never depicted.
Sex and romance may be the most extreme examples, but I think the phenomenon of movies and shows giving people false or impossible internal standards and unconscious expectations is much, much broader.
For example, when I was in my early twenties I suddenly realized that the reason I always felt disappointed after going to a party is that no party I ever went to looked anything like the ones I had seen in the movies I watched. There were no live bands, there was no spontaneous dancing out in the back yard or on dining room tables, nobody making out in dark corners, no hilarious hijinks of drunk frat boys doing cannon balls into the neighbors' pool. The parties I went to mostly involved small clusters of people having conversations, intellectual or quotidian. There were perhaps some light snacks and a bit of alcohol, and a little flirting, but everyone left in the same clothes they came in wearing and they were fine about that.
The thing is, I LIKE parties that are mostly about people hanging out having conversations. Heck, I like parties where people take turns reading each other passages out of their favorite books. The only problem with those parties was my own FOMO. I came away vaguely disappointed because real life did not resemble a John Hughes movie, and not because I even wanted to go to John Hughes movie parties, but because I thought that was how parties were SUPPOSED to be. Once I realized my expectations didn't make any sense, I was able to enjoy parties without feeling let down afterward.
Human beings, especially children, learn how to behave by modeling the behavior of their tribe. They watch what other people do, and what reactions they get, and copy or avoid doing likewise. Once humans achieved modernity, we got surrounded by simulacra of life in the form of media. Movies and television sneak past our conscious filters, and leave us with the specious understanding that what we see in them is worth imitating. Most of the time, it is not. Characters in these fictions laugh at jokes that aren't funny, get jealous or angry over trivial provocations, succeed in their careers for no discernible reasons. They cannot reliably teach us how to do comedy, or what is an appropriate emotional response, or what skills are key to success. They are not models for life, they are devices for serving plot. But it's too easy for the subconscious to mistake that.
So yes, by all means teach children and teens that what they see in media isn't a good guide to romance or sex (how many artificial romance plots would simply go *poof* if the protagonists simply talked to each other and cleared up a couple of basic miscommunications?), but while we're at it generalize the principle, and the tools, of skepticism to teach that movies and shows are not a good guide to friendship, responsible drinking, navigating a new job, or enjoying parties either.
That's a really solid extension of this blog post. It also might help explain why people seem so lonely nowadays. The 'romance' problem extends to friendships and jobs.
What, then, is the solution we can practice in our lives?
Loneliness is a huge problem in the US particularly, post Covid catastrophe especially. I don't have data on a solution, but something I think is worth trying is decoupling from our screens in favor of doing more in meat space with other human beings. Seek out old-fashioned ways of making our own fun and building relationships like our grandparents did. Organize block parties, host a regular board game night, form a restaurant club, join an Ultimate Frisbee league, take up a hobby or sport that involves group participation. Meet more old people who already have their social skills honed. Learn to play Bridge or Mahjongg at your local senior center. Join Toastmasters, or the Lions, or the Rotary club. Heck, join a church, mosque or synagogue.
Ukrika gives good advice. The solution is simple: Cut down time spent online (a lot) and meet people/engage in activities where you meet/are with other human beings in real life.
Good point. Though not so modern-only: Flaubert's Madame Bovary and a lot of french XIXth century literature depicts this problem, often in boring detail.
The problem of people confusing fictional characters for living role models is older than the contemporary era, sure, but the ever increasing ubiquity of fiction and pseudo-fiction (reality TV for example) is more recent, I think. The advent of television in most American homes, and then color television on top of that, seems to have been one important watershed. Neil Postman wrote about the problem in AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH, and Harlan Ellison did in his collection, THE GLASS TEAT.
How we consume fiction matters. The medium is the message and all that. Reading is an active cognitive process of converting marks on a page or screen into words and then meaning. It requires a certain critical engagement of the reader just to be possible at all. Moving color images require far less conscious participation of the viewer, and more nearly resemble our raw experiences of living in the world. As such, I think they are much more likely to bypass conscious analysis and go straight into the more primitive parts of the brain unexamined. We are bombarded with stories through our screens to a degree and in a way that 19th C. French fans of romantic fiction simply were not.
The sad part is we swallow things that’s being fed to us and regurgitate it as our reality. We don’t pause to think if this is what we want or if we’re just projecting. We walk around with what other people had decided should be our perspective or reality of things and realize too late that it wasn’t even for us.
THANK YOU for writing this! Sincerely, someone who wasted years 13-20 of his life pining after this one specific girl he barely knew (after meeting her at a 3-day retreat and never seeing her again) thereby gaining zero experience points in romance/sex during a period of life when most people are gaining lots of such experience and ending up way behind everyone else in learning to navigate romance/sex.
The burden of demanding romantic gestures is much less than the burden of demanding sex. Your partner wants a dozen roses? Great, you can do that with trivial cost in effort and money. But giving in to a partner’s request for a potentially painful or disturbing or repugnant sex act is a much bigger deal
I think Aella's point of view is skewed by the strange parts of the internet she spends time on. Lots of normal people, like Jason pointed out, see normal relationships all the time that aren't a romantic ideal, and are happy. Most people in my life have happy marriages with realistic romantic expectations.
Learning someone's romantic expectations is like learning their sexual preferences - you figure out what they like, and do it, almost independently of what you see in movies. My fiance needs love letters or he dies. I really like jewelry. Both of us can live without candlelit dinners. Everyone's like that, and the poison of Disney doesn't ruin that process for most people.
Heh, I totally agree. I feel I've been more damaged by romance in literature than by any porn that I've seen in my teenage years. In fact, I consider that I benefited from my teenage porn times: in my first sexual relationship I didn't have any problems at all finding the clit )
A little additional thought: at least snuff porn is really frowned upon in any polite company. In the world of romance? Romance-related murder or suicide is like a staple trope in romantic literature.
You are right on the money, Aella. Unrealistic ideas regarding romantic expectations have caused a mind blowing about of misery in this world. It is a sad state of affairs. Thank you to Aella for making a contribution to spreading the truth.
“True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen."
That's something de La Rouchefoucauld once wrote. I don't think it's true, but it seems apt.
There's a kernel of truth in this post, that the outer dressings of true love have obviously been somewhat influenced by stupid Disney-fication. But on the other hand those depictions of true love do not spring out from thin air, as little as pornography represents pure fiction.
Many have explained to that infatuated romance and true life-changing attraction is a silly Disney-concept, and that real relationships are very complicated, and that ghosts aren't real. Yet all this means exceptionally little, due to the fact that I believe I have seen a ghost: I saw my ghost wearing a long dress and bow at the train station central, and I saw her lying on my couch, bathed in orange sunlight, a warm evening in April.
And as anyone who has seen a ghost can attest – once you see it you never forget, and you don't doubt again.
What do you do if you haven't seen a ghost, or if your ghost disappears? Well, you either resign yourself to a life of utter mundanity, as many seem to have done – or you set out on a quest to someday, somewhere, somehow, find one. That's really all there is to it.
Great article as always, but I fear your premise is incorrect. Men are always the villains.
Recently a coworker hit on me at a happy hour, where I immediately reminded her that I’m married and turned her down since I’m married. When I told my wife about the situation she was furious with me. She wanted me to act out what a faerie from a fantasy smut novel would have done or whatever the fuck.
This is why communication is key! But in any case, it all comes down to if you're in to it and if your wife really means it. Nothing stops you/your wife from trying to talk to your co-worker.
Hear, hear! Let me add that men, too, can be horribly damaged by romantic expectations. I grew up believing that the goal of life was to have the Perfect Person think that you're the Perfect Person, and if you failed at that, you had totally blown it. In that mindset, it only takes one or two heartbreaks to shatter your self-esteem. Especially if you had a semi-autistic youth like me, and didn't experience a genuine friendship before your first romantic relationship.
I'll make a plug for Richard Schwartz's book, _You Are the One You've Been Waiting For_. Don't go looking for a relationship (sexual, romantic, or otherwise) to give you what you can only give yourself.
> Don't go looking for a relationship (sexual, romantic, or otherwise) to give you what you can only give yourself.
Oddly enough, I had the exact opposite experience - getting into my first romantic relationship in my early 30s (with someone who had even worse problems than I did) actually ended up fixing a lot of my issues as if by magic. The commonly given "be comfortable with yourself before you try looking for a relationship" advice happened to be completely counterproductive for me.
I think it's universal, not just men or women, that your first relationship is always a learning experience. You quite literally don't know what you're doing. Anything before that point is just imagination. This applies to both romance and sex, equally. And a particularly bad first experience can really mess you up. Not sure where I was going with this .. I agree with you.
I completely agree regarding the tales that kids are told, especially the fairy tales that always end at "happily ever after". What are good stories for kids that demonstrate the variety of realistic life in relationships? There are some. One relevant genre is Realistic Fiction, and an online search finds quite a few books and movies. The problem is that we, as parents, don't sufficiently expose our children to those stories, and some even prioritize the fairy tales over everything else.
This is so off. Romance is a celebration of love, often highly unrealistic but love is what it takes to make a relationship last. Porn is a celebration of narcissistic fantasies about people using each others bodies. If you want to see the difference clearly, romance will get you great sex but porn will not get you great romance
You seem to think that love is the strong force that makes relationships last. I'd counter that it takes other things-- compassion, humility, patience, understanding-- to make love last, and those are the things underportrayed in media. Expecting people to just love each other and have that be enough to sustain the relationship is naive
The problem there is how love has so many definitions that it easily leads to misunderstanding. I read that and thought “but doesn’t love include those things, aren’t they in the very definition?”. But then realized you were talking little-L limerence love (or that more chill ”post limerence, pre things-get-real” love).
imo the harm/potential trauma of expecting a person to be unbothered by a hardcore sex porn thing far outweighs disappointment from lacking a romantic gesture
communication can resolve both but i expect communication is more likely to arise from romantic relationships (reoccurring interactions) rather than casual sex (more likely not reoccuring)
On a broad scale I think you're probably more correct than not, but I do think you're leaving out one important distinction. In your fictional Pornlandia, the kids only see porn. They don't see non-porn sex. In our real-life Romancelandia, a pretty decent chunk (though certainly not all) of the kid population sees their parents interact with each other (or other non-parent partners). Some live through divorce, some see their parents succeed or fail with other people. If you have friends nearby, maybe you get to see their parents interact mundanely. That exposure to the everyday can't be discounted, even if our romance narratives can be overly rosy.
It's true that one of the benefits of romance not being stigmatized is that you get to see other people doing it in action more. I think:
1. This is also true for sex, people would be benefitted by seeing other people do it more
2. Porn does feature some realistic sex
3. I think you actually see less romance than you think. Lots of sexual foreplay is visible to outsiders (making out in parks, sexual joking), whereas a lot of the core of romance is not visible. My most romantic moments have happened with just me and the other person, it usually feels uncomfortable to put it on display, you know?
4. And even *then*, much of the romance that is visible is also heavily influenced by our romantic narratives. You do the kneeling proposal in the park and everyone cheers, you do the salient thing like getting her jewelry from the shop everyone gets jewelry from so that you are visibly partaking in a known romantic narrative, etc.
Where are you drawing the line between sexual foreplay and romance? Because you've implied that kissing in the park is sexual foreplay, but not the 'core of romance'.
I think it would be beneficial for you to pin down exactly what you mean by romance. Do you mean non-sexual intimacy? In which case, how do you distinguish between intense platonic friendships and infatuation?
My best guess is that you're referring to a pretty narrow band of interactions that I typically associate with the word 'courtship', but I don't want to be presumptuous. I'd definitely appreciate some clarification, though, because I'm struggling to form a coherent model of your views right now.
(EDIT: Full transparency here—I'm somewhat suspicious that you've gone and defined romance in a circular way, such that all of your observations about it are definitionally and trivially true (i.e. romance is all that stuff involved in performative, idealized courtship). So, I'd like to know what falls under the umbrella of romance for you that doesn't resemble those staid tropes, I guess, that we should be exposing our children to.)
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core romance"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
I like your funny words, magic man.
If you know, you know
What's it from?
Justice Stewart's concurrence in Jacobellis v. Ohio
You can differentiate between foreplay and sex based on biochemical payload delivery. The same is true with romance, but the chemicals are a little different. One of the great human disconnects is that the same behaviors that trigger romance payoff are just sex foreplay.
> people would be benefitted by seeing other people do it more
Keeping in mind that we're talking about *kids'* exposure to sex, what in the world would this look like?
If you're advocating for the legalization and destigmatization of porn use among kids, then we're back to the problem of most porn being a poor representation of sex. Did you have something else in mind?
When my parents tell me stories about how they had a nice date, I literally can't believe them -- they ask very differently with me around. There's no romance at all
That's a fair point, but I also think Aella has a very good point. Unrealistic expectations of what a relationship is lead to a lot of people being very disillusioned with love. Despite what they saw at home, or among their friends, a lot of people still expect things to be different for THEM.
Behavioural scientist Logan Ury calls these people "Romantizers" and "Maximizers" (people with unrealistic expectations of their relationships and their partners, respectively). It is a recognised and real condition. Romantic love has only existed for a few hundred years. Before then people did not expect it... but now we do.
Very few people look to their parent's lives and want exactly what they had. They're busy being parents, leading responsible lives, surviving parenthood, but when we look at what we want from our OWN lives, we expect more...
So I think there's a lot more truth in Aella's post than I think you're giving her credit for.
Romantic love has definitely not only existed for a few hundred years. Have you ever heard of the Iliad or the Odyssey? Caesar, Antony, and Cleopatra? Orpheus and Eurydice? Abelard and Heloise? Hadrian and Antinous? Plato's Symposium? Dante's Inferno?
Most of those stories were written and received as TRAGEDIES, and the rest weren't even romantic (Caesar and Cleopatra? Symposium?). There is nothing laudable about the story of Helen of Troy -- the resultant destruction of Troy was the most barbaric act in human history at that point. Odysseus slept with other women on his way back home -- and it was his HOME he longed for, not simply Penelope.
The idea that you should marry the person you fall in love with, and the infatuation with love as being something meaningful and healthy, is a modern invention. An idea that all of the stories you've quoted support.
What you said was that romantic love has only existed for a few hundred years. I agree that love marriages were historically not the default and infatuation was often viewed as dangerous, but that is a completely different claim from the one you originally made.
I wasn’t suggesting that human physiology had changed, but I could have been clearer 👍
What you said was that romantic love has only existed for a few hundred years. I agree that love marriages were historically not the default and infatuation was often viewed as dangerous, but that is a completely different claim from the one you originally made.
But a lot of porn is what you would call a "non-porn sex". Like, no anal reamings, no twenty black guys with gigantic cocks or something, no choking and face-cumming, just him and her making out, going through ten minutes of fairly tame foreplay and then doing a usual vaginal intercourse. Sure, with positions that look better for video, but still, not something you'd have trouble repeating in your own bedroom. There's like whole genres that are basically just sex, no kink.
Do yourself a favor. Go to PornHub and sort by the most watched videos of all time. Most people are not watching ten minutes of "fairly tame foreplay".
“Most watched videos“ <> “Staple videos people regularly fap to“. To get to the most watched, a video must contain some extra strong attention-grabbing ingredients in it, it’s not necessarily what the user watches 90% of his time.
Also, there are a lot of staple, always-there, quietly money making categories in porn that are not so attention-grabbing, but are preferred by a lot of people and are at least occasionally watched by pretty much everyone. Examples:
“For women“ - vanilla sex with extended foreplay and a lot of kissing and tenderness. Funnily enough, watched much more by males.
“My stepsister/stepmother…“ - vanilla sex where most of the times all of the kink is contained in the title of the scene and maybe a short dialogue before sex starts.
“Cheating“ - same as stepsister, “Cuckold“ - often vanilla with an addition of a passive male actor who watches the scene.
“Amateur“ - half of it is vanilla, again, most kink is in the assumption that the actors are not professionals. And so on.
So, a very good-sized (and well-watched, but not discussed by most people, because it’s not outrageous and attention-grabbing) sector of porn rests on filming what is basically a fairly regular sex act and spicing it up with an assumption that actors are transgressing somehow (note the word transgressing - NOT being normal, that’s the very point, otherwise the extra titillation would be lost), with said transgression quite often contained in nothing but the name of the scene or the category tag (no, for the stepsis videos they do not actually go searching for actors that are step-siblings IRL, sorry if that burst anyone’s expectations and/or ruined anyone’s next orgasm).
Even the “virgin” movies star actresses with twenty tattoos and six piercings and who obviously have at least double digit body counts, again it’s mostly in the preliminary conversation
Uhuh, the most watched videos are not the most watched videos. Stellar logic there, my friend 👍
I suppose the most watched movies of the year are not the movies most people watch. The most listened to songs are not the songs most people listen to. And the most played video games are not the games most players play. Shrug
Think of if this way: Oppa Gangnam Style is among the most watched music videos like, ever. I’ve seen it, you’ve probably seen it, everyone has seen it. However, how many people do you know who listen to it daily or have it in their favorite tracks list or even like that sort of music? Or, if that person's girlfriend asked them to sing her a song - would it be Oppa? I personally do not know a single such person (fine, I do know one K-pop fan, that's probably the closest it gets).
Or, if we are talking about porn, goatse. cx . The whole internet has seen the fucking thing, there's like a million call-outs to it in the culture if you know how to look. Do you know anyone who actually, you know, faps to that?
When Gangnam Style was racking up its views, it was because people WERE listening to it on a daily basis. It was being played by LOTS and LOTS of people regularly. It wasn’t just a meme, it was a hit. But either way, go look at the most viewed videos for the week or month if you’re still not convinced.
Then look at the most viewed videos for the week or month.
But Yossi - how would a kid know the difference? The point is that older folks know why and how a certain narrative is an idealised fantasy only because they lived decades or more experiencing reality. This is the purpose of the warnings and labels.
Idk. For me somehow it seemed definitely rather obvious even at my teenager virgin years that, for example, expecting that your partner would enjoy putting a large eggplant in her ass, is not realistic, even without experiencing it personally (and that porn is something better done by professionals, not in your home bedroom). However, the whole adult romance mystery is much less obviously unreal.
>>older folks know why and how a certain narrative is an idealised fantasy only because they lived decades or more experiencing reality.
p.s. exactly that. It doesn't take "decades of experiencing reality" to know whether you enjoy a sex position or find it painful. It takes one trial, well, at most, several, and some are very obviously not something you'd want to try, even if it's exciting to jack off to. It, however, does indeed take decades of experiencing reality to see the twists in romance.
If you want to see it there are enough people out there who are into exhibition -- or you can go to a sex club -- and really quickly get hit with the cold water of reality. The fact that people seem to kinda know this suggests to me they realize the level of unreality.
This seems like a pretty significant challenge to the thought experiment and I'd love to see Aella reply to it substantively.
I don't think it's correct to blame insane teenage romantic gestures on media. I think most of the insanity of teenagers has to do with the physical flood of hormones teenagers experience. Trans people or others who change their hormone balance later in life often have a very similar period, where they temporarily experience extreme levels of emotion especially around sex and romance..
When I started taking hormones in my late 20s, I had a 2-3 year period of "teenage love." I would fall in love for objectively poor reasons and feel driven to do objectively insane things for the person I was in love with. After a few years of being on hormones steadily, this just stopped on its own and my life got a lot more balanced. I don't think my media consumption pattern affected this at all, it was a physical reaction. The way teenagers act during puberty feels similar to this. The sheer strength of the emotion comes from the physical hormone balance, and maybe a few of the specific expressions of it being shaped by their media and social environment.
And I do think it's important for children to learn some kind of romance norms from early on. It's a very complex social structure, and just following your instincts around romance as a young person can get you into a terrible place. I think a certain percentage of charismatic high-agency people can do better in a world without any norms about flowers and tablecloths, but a more average person would probably struggle. They won't know what they like or want, when to initiate or when they're being initiated on, how to be safe, or how to progress a relationship forward or cut it off when they want to. Having simple and near-universal symbols and rituals available for anyone to use (flowers = romantic initiation) seems very useful for people who aren't prepared to blaze their own path in the romance world.
Romance norms provide a kind of training and structure, and I'd be wary of the impacts of kicking that structure away from people who need it.
I agree it is good for kids to learn some things around romance, in the same way they should learn things around sex!
I also agree that teen romance is downstream of hormones. So is teen sex. My point is not that the experience of the infatuation drug is manufactured, but rather that our infatuation narratives are taking advantage of an extremely potent innate experience.
What Disney sells are not norms, Disney peddles fantasies. Oh, and plastic toys. Lots of plastic toys. You might as well suggest that children should learn appropriate hygiene from a shampoo commercial as valorize the romantic "norms" in Disney movies. Yes, children and teens need to learn social norms, absolutely. From actual human beings who have successfully navigated the landscape. Absorbing toxic pseudo-norms from media is not beneficial to anyone but advertisers. Nobody needs to grow up expecting love at first sight, or that "one true love" is a thing, especially one to wait around for, or that fixating for years on a person you used to date is healthy.
I don't think modern Disney movies are actually selling a "one true love" norm in a meaningful way. Disney movies have increasingly focused on emphasizing that romance isn't everything and that you (the presumed female teenager) should exercise good sense and judgment about such matters. The most influential Disney movie among young girls in the last ~20 years is probably Frozen, which explicitly calls out love at first sight as being a bad idea and the source of the central plot problem for the main characters.
I do think societal norms will always be conveyed through stories in part, because that's just how humans work. When you're a child, you absorb things through listening to adults, but also through the bright colors and clear narratives of myth. I think Disney does a pretty good job in this regard, and if anything the common complaint modern Disney would get would likely be the conservative critique - that they're too Woke and don't put enough emphasis on successfully Producing the Couple, focusing instead on the myriad dangers of teenage relationships.
We seem to be at cross purposes. The "one true love" trope does not claim that romance is everything. It is the myth that there exists exactly one person who is your "true" love and that this person will exactly fit and completely meet all of your romantic needs, and vice versa. Anyone who does not precisely fulfill your needs, wants, and expectations is not your "true" love, so you need to keep looking, not unlike the prince seeking the one foot that will fit Cinderella's glass slipper. And insofar as Disney films are focusing on romance at all (and not all do or ever did) I think they're still peddling that myth.
Interesting that in FROZEN you appear to conflate "love at first sight" with "one true love" -- yes, it is critical of the former, but it seems to me that it's still firmly in the camp of the latter, recognizing that Hans was not Anna's "one true love" after all, but suggests that Kristoff might be.
And yes, myth and story are part of how humans learn. But an important difference in the degree to which Disney and other media are likely to distort and deform kids/teens expectations and implicit beliefs about love and romance (and other social institutions) compared to previous generations comes down to the massive increase in kids' screen time, both absolute and relative to in person social engagement. When kids saw Disney films maybe two or three times a year, in a movie theater, and watched cartoons for an hour or two after school, and spent much of their social lives playing with their friends outdoors, the net influence of media was necessarily a lot less. Now parents hand their toddlers an iPad to watch movies to keep them quiet and distracted, and give smart phones to children still in grade school. The screen time dominates their lives.
OK, Disney memetics are harmful in a variety of ways, and I'm sure we all appreciate the easy rhetorical symmetry of "Romcoms are just like porn for women." But it seems like a wildly false equivalency to ground this argument in the claim that expecting your wife to fake pleasure while you cum on her face is just exactly like expecting your husband to occasionally buy you flowers.
Paying $15 for some flowers you don't personally enjoy is in no way the hedonic equivalent to having someone else smear their sticky, strong-smelling bodily fluid over the most identity-aligned part of your body, in a culture where having a dirty or disordered face is universally regarded as humiliating.
You can test the hedonic non-equivalence with some thought experiments. For example, buying gifts to please others is so status-enhancing that wealthy people often performatively make charitable donations to enhance their prestige. By contrast, no PR person ever recommended that their client enhance their public reputation by getting publicly drizzled with another adult's body goo. The spouses I know who enjoy romantic gifts of flowers, would also gladly buy flowers for their partner on request. But I doubt most bukkake fans would be willing to have their own faces arbitrarily smeared with cum, or menstrual blood, or snot, to please a partner, unless they had a pre-existing fetish that way themselves.
Really, instead of defaulting to "it's all the same," it's interesting to itemize exactly what are the harmfully over-the-top relationship expectations supposedly being inculcated in romantic media. Disney princes... what, willingly aid princesses when they're in physical danger? Share their resources with princesses? Give up some (literally never all) of their time to help princesses with quests and projects, on the way to the altar?
Thinking through other classic romcoms like _The Notebook_, heroes conventionally... listen to the heroine and sympathize when she's upset? Have a few tastes in common with her and enjoy talking with her, or spending time together in nature? Think she's pretty, smart and special, and sometimes compliment her? Stay faithful to her for (implied to be) many years after initial infatuation, and continue to care for her in illness or old age? All of these, again, seem like fairly modest, pragmatic and realistic expectations to have of a partner if you're a monogamous person entering a relationship that may lead to pregnancy and joint childrearing.
What are examples of media romantic expectations that are the equivalent of porn memes like "a good sexual partner will be a dumb submissive bimbo with crossed eyes and her tongue out, mind empty no thoughts" or "a good sexual partner will love it when I choke her, spank her, slap her, ram her up the ass"? Much less "a good sexual partner is my stepsister, stuck in a washing machine and unable to escape while I forcibly and transgressively have my way with her"?
Seriously this was perhaps the worst analogy imaginable. I purchase flowers for my mother and sister and mother-in-law on mother's day. I send flowers to people to express sympathy or congratulations. It's universally considered a nice gesture indicating you care about someone.
Tarnishing someone's face is universally understood as degrading, dishonorable, and humiliating, hence the commonly used idoms "mud on your face" or "spit in your face". I'd love to see anyone walk up and smear even something non-offensive like peanut butter on their parent's or boss's face. No one would. You could give flowers to any stranger on the street and they'd thank you.
She's comparing a boyfriend's desire to do something universally understood as a degrading and humiliating offense to something universally understood as a gesture of kindness and goodwill, and acting as if they're equivalent. I like Aella and most of what she writes but I frankly finding the equivalency being drawn here to be appalling.
You make a good point about porn being the more extreme example. I agree, Aella likely doesn't because she's one of the ones that enjoys extreme sex.
The issue with romance on TV is that it doesn't really show people how to live their own lives. It's like picking a meal at a restaurant rather than learning to make food at home with the twelve ingredients you have, two of which are starting to turn. People have the implicit expectation that they can just choose, and find, the story they want instead of slowly building their own. And you need to build your own because restaurants don't exist.
Yeah you're absolutely right about the poor quality of the comparison. The sexual acts in porn are usually much more explicit, extreme, invasive, and physically harmful.
Part of that is because much of sex and porn takes place in a visual or physical medium, and acts in those realms there are going to by default be more legibly extreme. By comparison, romantic acts largely tend to take place in the more subtle emotional and psychological realms.
I don't think Aella is condemning all romantic narratives (just like she isn't condemning all sex or porn.)
Instead, she's pointing to the elements of a specific kind of romantic extremism in the examples she gave: the self-centeredness, the main character syndrome, the pursuit of a romantic context without regard to the consent of the participation of the other, the invasiveness, and the emotional desensitization.
Where Aella has more of an actual argument is in the similarity of the mechanisms. Both fantasy worlds are built by similar means, and produce unreal expectations that can be dehumanizing and harm our relationships with others.
With sexual extremism, the dehumanization is familiar: the reduction of someone to a sexual object receiving or performing acts, without regard to their consent or humanity.
With romantic extremism, the dehumanization is actually pretty similar, but more so comes from forgetting that the fantasy (whatever ideals we've constructed it from) doesn't come for free: any approximation of the fantasy has to be built and co-created with another person, and the process to fulfilling and maintaining it will be much less linear and frictionless. They aren't merely a puppet fulfilling your romantic desires, but their own person.
In this extremism, the other person ceases to be fully human. Their actions become entirely dictated through the lens of whether or not they align with your fantasy, and there's much less room for their own emotions, flaws, preferences, and ignorance.
Instead, at best, they become a character that is refusing to play their part. At worst they are actively, intentionally, and maliciously denying and hurting you.
And much like actual porn, it also desensitizes you: because you're calibrated relative to the extreme, there's much less pleasantry and enjoyment to be derived from the process of achieving a shared fantasy. Everything becomes about arrival, rather than the intimacy of the joint journey.
I agree that contemporary romance fiction promotes a narcissistic "main character" outlook, although in my experience the dehumanization shows up less within the actual courtship plotline and much more with respect to secondary characters. Rivals, friends, parents, and exes in these books definitely *are* all just narratively convenient props, there to be cartoonishly mean so the heroine can be embattled, or to be prettier/richer but then suffer various terrible misfortunes so she can enjoy schadenfreude, or to be beloved and die so the heroine can have a melancholy past, or to deliver lame speeches of affirmation and forgiveness when she's behaved in morally questionable ways.
By contrast, I actually don't know many romances where the Prince Charming is put through any kind of crazy suffering or sacrifice to win the girl, or even where he's made to act in ways contrary to normal self-interest, beyond being expected to be physically/ emotionally protective and show ardent interest. Perhaps it's important for the status-enhancing features of the Prince that he be healthy, sane and fully agentic, so that it can be authentically flattering when he chooses the Main Girl?
I'm sure there's issues with the plots of a lot of romance stories, but I don't really think they're the primary issue themselves. Any of us can point to a lot of aspects of certain modern romance sub-genres that are questionable (you named several) but what genres don't have that anyways — let he without sin cast the first stone, and all that.
My concern is more what happens when real people in the real world see themselves as the center of idealized romantic narrative and destiny, and the way people who aren't them — the main character — can be flattened and lose complexity in pursuit of that destiny.
I personally think the issue is less with romantic media and more... the culture romantically extremist outcomes they *can* contribute to, if that makes sense
Sure, seeing yourself as "the center of an idealized romantic narrative and destiny" is an extremely real problem, but is it arguably just a problem with all novel-like media, full stop? Literary scholarship pointed out decades ago that the classic Luke Skywalker coming-of-age journey and the adorkable outcast heroine falling for Prince Charming are both secularized variants of the Protestant conversion narrative, the Pilgrim's Progress where you stumble through misunderstandings with the world until you realize your own election: all you needed was to follow your own inner light of grace all along. It *is* a bit self-absorbed, because you're saved by faith, not works: there's nobody else really there except the soul and God.
On the other hand, the atomized hero following their own lonely destiny, accountable to their inner vision alone, canonized by a faceless God from above because nobody else really exists except as set-dressing, is sort of the orthodox model for modern selfhood, isn't it? What psychologically rich narratives do we have that promote anything else? Even the most collective team sports, friends, band or war story is going to eventually pull in to center on the protagonist alone with their convictions and their own emerging character.
> Sure, seeing yourself as "the center of an idealized romantic narrative and destiny" is an extremely real problem, but is it arguably just a problem with all novel-like media, full stop?
I think you're spot on.
I will say that I think what distinguishes some narratives from others is that, depending on the culture, we may or may not have beliefs or narratives as part of that culture that ensure we as individuals develop more balanced, well-adjusted perspectives about ourselves and the world around us.
Some narratives have that quality naturally: they're so obviously exaggerated, unreal, and unattainable that it's difficult to absorb them as-is. Other narratives are more insidious, and you actually need the presence of sufficiently contrasting and grounding counter-narratives.
(By the way, I appreciate your trip down "how are we just repackaging older religious tendencies in new dressing?" Always a fun ride.)
Whether these are false equivalency really just comes down to taste. As someone else noted, Aella (and some other people) actually _like_ some of the stuff done in porn that you consider way out of bounds (heck, some people like the smell and taste of cum; also, pineapple juice helps!)
But romcoms/Disney are harmful not just because of what they show but what they do not, such as much of real life relationships being about the very much unsexy and not-at-all romantic parts of dealing with differing expectations, various differences, the kids, outside stressors, etc. Porn obviously doesn't show that either, but I'm going to hazard a guess that more people are more misled in to thinking that romcoms and Disney are closer to reality than that porn is.
All narrative, by necessity, leaves out gritty practical details, though. Sports stories leave out most of the actual training, plus days of boring travel, the grind of minor injuries. War movies mostly leave out trench foot and grinding daily discomfort and the minutiae of fighting with your buddy over some minor thing.
Focusing, pruning, and sanitizing and soft-focusing are a normal part of storytelling about anything. But that's meaningfully different from presenting a fundamentally false or harmful view of the human relationship you're depicting.
Porn, as a form of storytelling, also does its fair share of romanticizing by omitting practical realities. For instance, it deliberately leaves out the normal sex experiences of smegma, women's pubic hair (!!), enemas, lube, erection drugs, blood from periods starting unexpectedly, laundering sticky or shit-stained sheets, B.O. and related unsavory scents, farts and queefs and vomit, flappy/unflattering angles, condoms or birth control and side effects, getting cold or tired, plus the messiness of negotiating plans, getting tested or treated for STDs, gaining consent, dealing with pregnancy or aborting the baby, etc.
However, when people say that porn conditions a harmful and anti-human approach to sex, they're not talking about porn leaving out messy details about queefing and B.O.
Messages like *"It's sexy when you treat a woman violently or degradingly, gum up her face, eyes and hair with your cum, call her insulting names, remove her human agency by choking or restraining or hitting or outnumbering her, shove your dick forcefully in her unlubed orifices with no pleasure receptors, talk lustfully about DESTROYING all her HOLES.... a good woman will enjoy all this, because that's what women are for!"*, those messages are harmfully wrong in *content*, and that's true no matter how many women catch onto the message and get either socially conditioned or (as with Aella) traumatically induced to try to regain agency by actively pursuing sex that degrades and hurts.
Being false at the core, in a harmful direction, seems vastly different from being directionally true but overly sanitized.
(Edit: unless the point actually was that "Good men admire and pay attention to the women they love, and want to protect and help them even at some cost to themselves" is also directionally false, because in reality men don't want any of those things and hate having to pretend? On some level, that's the vibe I'm reading from the original article's claim that buying flowers for your wife on Valentine's is the same as being gang-raped, or whatever.)
I thought of a concrete, positive answer to your question of the romantic equivalent of problematic porn tropes, and I'd like to get your take on it.
I think that a lot of romantic fiction, especially literature, teaches women that they can read minds. I gave a detailed, hypothetical example of this in a comment from several months ago:
https://aella.substack.com/p/the-difficulty-in-dating-good-men/comment/155229444
Lines like "his eyes darted to the side, betraying his insecurity" are convenient for conveying exposition and establishing the main character's competence, even though they're ridiculous leaps in reasoning.
For an example of how this toxifies real women's behavior, consider the scrutiny that Erika Kirk received after the recent assassination attempt against Trump. Much of it consists of wild speculation on the basis of her body cues. For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi7J3EEeMec&lc=UgzlGepF0HXa6SWPliJ4AaABAg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi7J3EEeMec&lc=UgwCoLFY2kpPRCyah814AaABAg
I've heard some people attribute this behavior to the true crime genre, instead, but I associate it more with romance. (Admittedly, I don't consume much of either, but I think we're all shooting from the hip with respect to the media we're critiquing.)
>Lines like "his eyes darted to the side, betraying his insecurity" are convenient for conveying exposition and establishing the main character's competence, even though they're ridiculous leaps in reasoning.
Lines like that are just how bad writing works in a story that needs some interiority, though-- nothing specific to romance fiction. Given a scene where you need to establish complex or evolving motivations, a good writer will find a way to _show_ the feeling through some nuance of dialogue or action, but a bad writer cranking out genre fiction will take the lazy way out and just tell you the twist of their mouth indicated sardonic joy, or whatever.
Here's an example from Jack London, a Boy's Own writer if ever there was one, in a story with no romance or female characters whatsoever. London is a decent writer, so the emotional tell-don't-show is a bit milder, but it's recognizably the same mind-reading pattern:
> He had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent voice, gentle-spoken as a maid’s, seemed the placid embodiment of some deep-seated melancholy. He was the Leopard Man, but he did not look it. His business in life, whereby he lived, was to appear in a cage of performing leopards before vast audiences...
I suspect this kind of direct narration of feelings gets linked to romance and crime fiction because romance and crime stories are frequently low-quality and mass-produced by people not bothering to write well. But I'm not seeing how the move is central to the romcom genre. Romcom films rarely if ever do this kind of explicit inference, for instance, and I don't recall Disney featuring it at all.
Thanks for the reply.
I agree that it's bad writing. Good romance respects the limits of what people can actually infer about each other. Similarly, good porn respects the limits of what people (including women) are actually aroused by.
That said, I don't think that "it's just bad writing" absolves the romance genre of this criticism. As Sturgeon's saying goes, "90% of everything is crap". A genre's characteristic flaws are common enough to affect people's behavior even though the best examples of that genre don't contain those flaws.
Additionally, I do think it's fair to label mind-reading as a characteristic flaw of romance, given that the genre disproportionately focuses on characters' interpersonal feelings.
Finally, I acknowledge that my point is limited to written mediums. I don't claim that mind-reading is *the* problem with Romancelandia, only that it's *a* problem. For example, the point that I raised in my other comment--the systematic replacement of calm, mundane conversations with grand gestures and harsh quarrels--also applies to film.
> What are examples of media romantic expectations that are the equivalent of porn memes
That's a great line of inquiry. Similar to Richard's point, I think that most of the romantic genre's sins are those of omission, not commission.
In particular, romantic stories do not depict effective ways of working through interpersonal problems. In real life, it requires lots of calm conversation about mundane subjects. By definition, that doesn't evoke strong emotions, so it's a chore to watch and to read, and so it's never depicted.
Sex and romance may be the most extreme examples, but I think the phenomenon of movies and shows giving people false or impossible internal standards and unconscious expectations is much, much broader.
For example, when I was in my early twenties I suddenly realized that the reason I always felt disappointed after going to a party is that no party I ever went to looked anything like the ones I had seen in the movies I watched. There were no live bands, there was no spontaneous dancing out in the back yard or on dining room tables, nobody making out in dark corners, no hilarious hijinks of drunk frat boys doing cannon balls into the neighbors' pool. The parties I went to mostly involved small clusters of people having conversations, intellectual or quotidian. There were perhaps some light snacks and a bit of alcohol, and a little flirting, but everyone left in the same clothes they came in wearing and they were fine about that.
The thing is, I LIKE parties that are mostly about people hanging out having conversations. Heck, I like parties where people take turns reading each other passages out of their favorite books. The only problem with those parties was my own FOMO. I came away vaguely disappointed because real life did not resemble a John Hughes movie, and not because I even wanted to go to John Hughes movie parties, but because I thought that was how parties were SUPPOSED to be. Once I realized my expectations didn't make any sense, I was able to enjoy parties without feeling let down afterward.
Human beings, especially children, learn how to behave by modeling the behavior of their tribe. They watch what other people do, and what reactions they get, and copy or avoid doing likewise. Once humans achieved modernity, we got surrounded by simulacra of life in the form of media. Movies and television sneak past our conscious filters, and leave us with the specious understanding that what we see in them is worth imitating. Most of the time, it is not. Characters in these fictions laugh at jokes that aren't funny, get jealous or angry over trivial provocations, succeed in their careers for no discernible reasons. They cannot reliably teach us how to do comedy, or what is an appropriate emotional response, or what skills are key to success. They are not models for life, they are devices for serving plot. But it's too easy for the subconscious to mistake that.
So yes, by all means teach children and teens that what they see in media isn't a good guide to romance or sex (how many artificial romance plots would simply go *poof* if the protagonists simply talked to each other and cleared up a couple of basic miscommunications?), but while we're at it generalize the principle, and the tools, of skepticism to teach that movies and shows are not a good guide to friendship, responsible drinking, navigating a new job, or enjoying parties either.
That's a really solid extension of this blog post. It also might help explain why people seem so lonely nowadays. The 'romance' problem extends to friendships and jobs.
What, then, is the solution we can practice in our lives?
Loneliness is a huge problem in the US particularly, post Covid catastrophe especially. I don't have data on a solution, but something I think is worth trying is decoupling from our screens in favor of doing more in meat space with other human beings. Seek out old-fashioned ways of making our own fun and building relationships like our grandparents did. Organize block parties, host a regular board game night, form a restaurant club, join an Ultimate Frisbee league, take up a hobby or sport that involves group participation. Meet more old people who already have their social skills honed. Learn to play Bridge or Mahjongg at your local senior center. Join Toastmasters, or the Lions, or the Rotary club. Heck, join a church, mosque or synagogue.
Ukrika gives good advice. The solution is simple: Cut down time spent online (a lot) and meet people/engage in activities where you meet/are with other human beings in real life.
Good point. Though not so modern-only: Flaubert's Madame Bovary and a lot of french XIXth century literature depicts this problem, often in boring detail.
The problem of people confusing fictional characters for living role models is older than the contemporary era, sure, but the ever increasing ubiquity of fiction and pseudo-fiction (reality TV for example) is more recent, I think. The advent of television in most American homes, and then color television on top of that, seems to have been one important watershed. Neil Postman wrote about the problem in AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH, and Harlan Ellison did in his collection, THE GLASS TEAT.
How we consume fiction matters. The medium is the message and all that. Reading is an active cognitive process of converting marks on a page or screen into words and then meaning. It requires a certain critical engagement of the reader just to be possible at all. Moving color images require far less conscious participation of the viewer, and more nearly resemble our raw experiences of living in the world. As such, I think they are much more likely to bypass conscious analysis and go straight into the more primitive parts of the brain unexamined. We are bombarded with stories through our screens to a degree and in a way that 19th C. French fans of romantic fiction simply were not.
The sad part is we swallow things that’s being fed to us and regurgitate it as our reality. We don’t pause to think if this is what we want or if we’re just projecting. We walk around with what other people had decided should be our perspective or reality of things and realize too late that it wasn’t even for us.
THANK YOU for writing this! Sincerely, someone who wasted years 13-20 of his life pining after this one specific girl he barely knew (after meeting her at a 3-day retreat and never seeing her again) thereby gaining zero experience points in romance/sex during a period of life when most people are gaining lots of such experience and ending up way behind everyone else in learning to navigate romance/sex.
The burden of demanding romantic gestures is much less than the burden of demanding sex. Your partner wants a dozen roses? Great, you can do that with trivial cost in effort and money. But giving in to a partner’s request for a potentially painful or disturbing or repugnant sex act is a much bigger deal
I think Aella's point of view is skewed by the strange parts of the internet she spends time on. Lots of normal people, like Jason pointed out, see normal relationships all the time that aren't a romantic ideal, and are happy. Most people in my life have happy marriages with realistic romantic expectations.
Learning someone's romantic expectations is like learning their sexual preferences - you figure out what they like, and do it, almost independently of what you see in movies. My fiance needs love letters or he dies. I really like jewelry. Both of us can live without candlelit dinners. Everyone's like that, and the poison of Disney doesn't ruin that process for most people.
Heh, I totally agree. I feel I've been more damaged by romance in literature than by any porn that I've seen in my teenage years. In fact, I consider that I benefited from my teenage porn times: in my first sexual relationship I didn't have any problems at all finding the clit )
A little additional thought: at least snuff porn is really frowned upon in any polite company. In the world of romance? Romance-related murder or suicide is like a staple trope in romantic literature.
You are right on the money, Aella. Unrealistic ideas regarding romantic expectations have caused a mind blowing about of misery in this world. It is a sad state of affairs. Thank you to Aella for making a contribution to spreading the truth.
“True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen."
That's something de La Rouchefoucauld once wrote. I don't think it's true, but it seems apt.
There's a kernel of truth in this post, that the outer dressings of true love have obviously been somewhat influenced by stupid Disney-fication. But on the other hand those depictions of true love do not spring out from thin air, as little as pornography represents pure fiction.
Many have explained to that infatuated romance and true life-changing attraction is a silly Disney-concept, and that real relationships are very complicated, and that ghosts aren't real. Yet all this means exceptionally little, due to the fact that I believe I have seen a ghost: I saw my ghost wearing a long dress and bow at the train station central, and I saw her lying on my couch, bathed in orange sunlight, a warm evening in April.
And as anyone who has seen a ghost can attest – once you see it you never forget, and you don't doubt again.
What do you do if you haven't seen a ghost, or if your ghost disappears? Well, you either resign yourself to a life of utter mundanity, as many seem to have done – or you set out on a quest to someday, somewhere, somehow, find one. That's really all there is to it.
Great article as always, but I fear your premise is incorrect. Men are always the villains.
Recently a coworker hit on me at a happy hour, where I immediately reminded her that I’m married and turned her down since I’m married. When I told my wife about the situation she was furious with me. She wanted me to act out what a faerie from a fantasy smut novel would have done or whatever the fuck.
Your wife sounds like me:)
The idea of my man fucking other women is like foreplay for me
What?
Be careful, if you open up the relationship she is likely to get a lot more action than you!
This is why communication is key! But in any case, it all comes down to if you're in to it and if your wife really means it. Nothing stops you/your wife from trying to talk to your co-worker.
Hear, hear! Let me add that men, too, can be horribly damaged by romantic expectations. I grew up believing that the goal of life was to have the Perfect Person think that you're the Perfect Person, and if you failed at that, you had totally blown it. In that mindset, it only takes one or two heartbreaks to shatter your self-esteem. Especially if you had a semi-autistic youth like me, and didn't experience a genuine friendship before your first romantic relationship.
I'll make a plug for Richard Schwartz's book, _You Are the One You've Been Waiting For_. Don't go looking for a relationship (sexual, romantic, or otherwise) to give you what you can only give yourself.
> Don't go looking for a relationship (sexual, romantic, or otherwise) to give you what you can only give yourself.
Oddly enough, I had the exact opposite experience - getting into my first romantic relationship in my early 30s (with someone who had even worse problems than I did) actually ended up fixing a lot of my issues as if by magic. The commonly given "be comfortable with yourself before you try looking for a relationship" advice happened to be completely counterproductive for me.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/
I think it's universal, not just men or women, that your first relationship is always a learning experience. You quite literally don't know what you're doing. Anything before that point is just imagination. This applies to both romance and sex, equally. And a particularly bad first experience can really mess you up. Not sure where I was going with this .. I agree with you.
I completely agree regarding the tales that kids are told, especially the fairy tales that always end at "happily ever after". What are good stories for kids that demonstrate the variety of realistic life in relationships? There are some. One relevant genre is Realistic Fiction, and an online search finds quite a few books and movies. The problem is that we, as parents, don't sufficiently expose our children to those stories, and some even prioritize the fairy tales over everything else.
This is so off. Romance is a celebration of love, often highly unrealistic but love is what it takes to make a relationship last. Porn is a celebration of narcissistic fantasies about people using each others bodies. If you want to see the difference clearly, romance will get you great sex but porn will not get you great romance
You seem to think that love is the strong force that makes relationships last. I'd counter that it takes other things-- compassion, humility, patience, understanding-- to make love last, and those are the things underportrayed in media. Expecting people to just love each other and have that be enough to sustain the relationship is naive
The problem there is how love has so many definitions that it easily leads to misunderstanding. I read that and thought “but doesn’t love include those things, aren’t they in the very definition?”. But then realized you were talking little-L limerence love (or that more chill ”post limerence, pre things-get-real” love).
imo the harm/potential trauma of expecting a person to be unbothered by a hardcore sex porn thing far outweighs disappointment from lacking a romantic gesture
communication can resolve both but i expect communication is more likely to arise from romantic relationships (reoccurring interactions) rather than casual sex (more likely not reoccuring)