The seventh note

Embarrassingly romantic.

Buenos días, good morning, pensive, loving, long morning. Another Sunday! If you’re new, welcome! Thanks for joining this assortment of ordinary thoughts.

What have you been up to? I’ve been listening to Folklore, Taylor Swifts new album, for the last couple of days. This review by Amanda Petrusich is lovely, I recommended listening to the album with it too. Love in its different forms is the thread that ties together the sixteen songs. (From the article: “anyone who has ever been in love and fucked up, or been in love and got fucked over, will find something gaspingly true in her lyrics”).

I promise this newsletter isn’t about Taylor Swift but its funny how the universe sometimes puts things in your lap (this time, ears) when you’re thinking about something.

(From the game We are Not Really Strangers)

Romance seems to be so far away from reach in the world I live today. (When I say world, I say my experience of the world, my specific life, the one I’ve fallen into, the one I continue to create for myself). It is merely available through viral proposal videos or instagram photos of my beautiful friends, coupled up, or novels and shows like Normal People. It is accessible through long, pressed kisses between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall on my Criterion collection or sentences from poems and songs we can immerse ourselves in. Romance just isn’t a muscle that we seem to use anymore, as so many other issues are taking up space in our heads: equality, a pandemic, war, politics, new technology, climate change, consent,... the list goes on and on and on. 

Year after year I have asked myself, but especially when I was in college, when romance turned into something I had to reject. When ‘being romantic’ had turned into something… bad? Bad seems too big of a word. Something to avoid, lesser, second place. Scribbled in a lost notebook the question is repeated in different forms, burned into the pages with angsty ink. When had romance taken the backseat? For years I had formed the idea in my head that love and romance walked hand in hand, fairytale love a possibility, big gestures a must. Romance as a way of life. 

Somewhere along the way I started learning that games, playing tough, being detached, other ideas of love, other ways to love, other relationships, sex-- were imperative. That freedom and romance were antonyms. 

And so, almost 20 years later, I have come to the conclusion that I am now embarrassed by the fact that I’m romantic. Guilt has taken over. I cannot lay a finger as to when I felt like I should shy away from this way of being, but I have, at least for a while.

Through the years my idea of love has morphed, my experiences in love have expanded and shrunk, my relationships have changed from puppy love to distraction to acuteness. But there is one thing that has never changed, no matter how much I have tried, year after year, since I was 6 years old and I came home to my mom sobbing to the point I frightened her, because “Antonio” had ‘broken my heart’: I’m a sucker for romance. I’m a sucker for love. 

Love is front and center in my brain: love for my family and friends, love for my career, love for glistening New York City, London and Spain, love for the orange juice machines in the Spanish bars that pump out a juice that merely costs 2 euros. Love for sweet, cute, corny beings, ideas.

This of course, also applies to most relationships I’ve had. 

As humans, the first thing we learn about love is through our families, our parents, a love that isn’t romantic but nurturing, a love that keeps you safe and alive. And somehow, at some point, we learn that there is another kind of love. Romantic love. A love greater than life. So big it is embodied in paintings and fairytales, in sculptures and movies. It takes form in animated ways, in essays, in stories we are told, in gossip that circulates around school. As women, we are told we will be swept off our feet, showered in flowers, diamonds, white dresses. We are told “the one” exists, we are taught to wait to say I love you no matter how much you might be bursting to tell your person. Society tells each other there are steps and boundaries, there are milestones. We’ve invented destiny, quotes, long monologues in movies that tug at our heartstrings. Nora Ephron told us that love was in bookstores and fate was real. The Obamas told us power and love could be real. Shit, we even made a way to commercialize a holiday out of it.

These things are all changing, being challenged - thanks to Gen Z and probably millennials too, and as a 25 year old latter one, I so much want to be part of that change too. I want to be part of that club. But I gravitate towards what one could call... convention but I like to call romance. 

As I write this I realize my face is all scrunched up, I look like I’m angry, in disgust. I feel sorry for my face, my future wrinkles, my future tense jaw. But mostly I feel bad I feel so rejecting of such a deep part of who I am. I have fought against myself year after year, sometimes more, sometimes less, always intensely aware of it. How can I be conventional? Why? Why me!? I’m the child of separated parents who did not embody the idea of romance! My mom has pushed me to be a strong independent woman! Am I not one?! Why. Am. I. So. Obsessed. With. The. Idea. Of. Love?! You can tell, I’ve tortured myself over the idea of craving romance.

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I am not sure how I came to the conclusion that being a feminist and being romantic were mutually exclusive, were not able to live in the same plane. It’s as if being independent, wanting independence, truly can’t cope with the idea of the melancholy of love, the feeling of needing and wanting someone so bad you’ll write letters, or imagining a future together, no matter how close the ending might be.

I do not know if this is something someone has told me or something I’ve read. It might have been twitter, who the fuck knows. I wonder if it’s a combination of both and this push to truly want to embody the idea of what I think a feminist should be like- succesful on her own.   

I want to be the kind of woman that dreads going to weddings. I wish I could write essays like I Thee Dread or 18 Brides a Year by Jia Tolentino (the second inspiring the first). Because there is so much I agree with, like for example how stupid erasing your name feels like or how crazy it is to spend so much money for a single day. And I wish I could say “I HATE weddings”. But I don’t. However stupid the idea of institutionally bound people, I love watching newly weds dance and be completely exhausted by a celebration. I love crying when I’m listening to their vows. I love watching them kiss. Just like I might love saying I love you or summer storms or making out to music and dancing. 

My sister says being romantic is a synonym to idealizing the world. Thinking it might be like a movie, like when you listen to music on the bus and feel you’re the main character of a film. She’s right, of course. 

On Saturday my mom and I went for a walk around Santiago de Compostela. It’s this very famous city in the North of Spain where pilgrims end up after doing the Camino de Santiago. In the big main square, in front of this huge cathedral where the pilgrims reach their final journey, a place of reverence and elation, there’s a beautiful hotel. We were walking around watching people finish their pilgrimage and from the hotels balcony a bride and groom with some dressed up kids and a photographer came out to take some photos. Everyone at the plaza looked up and smiled and someone in the crowd started screaming “¡Vivan los novios!” (something like long live the bride and groom, but more fun) and the whole plaza joined. The couple started laughing, going back inside but we all started screaming, “que se besen, que se besen!”, a chant for them to kiss. They came out, giggling, kissed and everyone cheered. They both waved, like they were royalty and the whole plaza clapped and hailed, and honestly, it was a very special moment. I felt lucky to witness it, lucky to be part of it, and after they went back inside I felt a knot in my throat. I was moved and it felt… so good.

Maybe coming to terms with the idea that I can love whatever the fuck I want, no matter how corny it might be, coming to terms that I can want whatever I want, in whichever terms, time, moment I’d like, is me being the ultimate feminist. Who knows.

Who gives a fuck if people think romance is dead? I’m here to bring it back with Taylor Swift’s help.