The Romantic: How my Genre of Choice Impacted my Dating Experience.

From a young age, I loved romance novels. When you’re a teen, it isn’t marketed as that, but I always gravitated to stories about passion and love. Whether it was corny, horny, or both (am I allowed to talk about that from when I was a teen? Oh well) I wanted it. 

During my life before Nick, we can call it BN, I used these books as a blueprint to how I went about dating. But here’s the catch. In doing that, I messed up… a lot. Way more than I realized at the time. Shit, even AN (after Nick) I messed up a lot in the beginning of our relationship. 

I knew that the chaos I ensued in my life wasn’t helping me. I kept thinking “well, this time it might work.” I think some of it was conscious, but most of it was that I truly didn’t realize how dysfunctional my patterns were. Same patterns of hoping that my love story would turn out like the books, but different behaviors on the surface. 

The highest amount of books I read in a year was 2021. I read 51 books (so close to one a week). Two weeks later, on January 16th, I met Nick. BN, I had maybe 3 actual relationships. Even then, I had a skewed view of what a healthy relationship looks like. Partially because of they were as people (iykyk) but also because of who I was.

I thought love meant grand gestures. But I also thought love looked like the little things. But I also thought that caring for me should be natural. But I also thought that I had to communicate a rule-book of what it meant to care for me. It was a lot of thoughts.

The books I read would bring me to tears. They were beautiful. They were all of those things. The characters worked through conflict, and even if it was messy, which it usually was, they fought for their love and ended up together. 

When conflict arose, differences in politics, communication, where we saw things “going,” or even something small, I thought eventually, the right person would be the one to still fight for me. What I found was a hell of a lot of disappointment and feeling like I who I am was never enough. 

About 6 month before I met Nick, I introduced someone to my parents and sister for the first time since 2018. Things ended, duh, because I wasn’t outdoorsy enough (which to this day is still mind boggling to me because I’ve never pretended to be outdoorsy… anyway). The MONDAY morning he told me these things, I thought “well, maybe I could outdoorsy.” So that night, we camped on a makeshift tent on top of his truck (I also hated trucks, besides ours now). This was me fighting for us. The next day, we fished, I fell in the mud, and the he said he still felt the same. I left. 

I did everything right. And I still didn’t get fought for. That moment was humbling to say the least. But mostly it prompted me to reconsider a lot of things surrounding dating.

I read a self help book, Single is Your Super Power. Which as corny as it was, helped me reflect on a lot. While I read this, I also tried to consider more and more who I wanted to be and how I wanted to build upon parts of myself I already liked. 

When I met Nick for the first time, I got our booth and was reading before he arrived. It was, you guessed it, a romance book. The first year we dated, I learned old tricks die hard. I still was passive in my communication. I still wanted him to read my mind. I still wanted “passion” which was actually chaos. Nick didn’t fight for us in the ways I expected. He did however stay patient and steady, even when I was speaking an entirely different language. Between our brains being wired so differently (insert a joke about a therapist and an engineer walking into a bar here) and how much therapy I had done, we were both drinking from a fire hydrant of information on how to love each other. 

Since it wasn’t always this grandiose expression of love, I thought he didn’t care as much about me. Since I made drinks when Nick would come over, he thought I didn’t have as much fun with him when I was sober. It wasn’t unhealthy, per se, but we both had a lot of learning to do. 

I don’t think couples fall in love and match like two perfectly cut out puzzle pieces. Even when reading my books I knew that. I did however think that after one “big” conflict, we’d be fine and never have any more. 

I learned a very unrealistic view of love from my romance novels. I knew that they were stories but I still thought that since they all ended happily after 300 pages, my relationship should at least be perfect after 6 months, give or take. 

I love Nick because of how he loves me. He doesn’t need to fight for me. He needs to be willing to learn with me, grow with me, and care for me. Just as I need to do for him. He has shown me time and time again that he will. There are moments where we’ve both experienced disappointment, anger, or a whole slew of emotions toward each other. That doesn’t take away an ounce of love I know he has for me. 

Growing up in the church, and this is the only thing I’m going to say about this, I learned a very “pure” view of what relationships are. If you sin against each other, you repent and you get stronger, use it for your testimony and it’ll all be fine. If you don’t work through it, you don’t talk about it. If you work through it but it’s “too dirty” you never speak of it again. 

Between that, and my romance novels, I had a skewed view of relationships. I was also easily impressionable given my own mental health and development. So I don’t blame it all on the church or romance novels. I do think they had an impact though. 

Now, as I’ve matured, grown with Nick, and don’t feel pressure to constantly have it all figured out, surprise surprise, I’ve been happier than ever with Nick. Life will happen, we will face stressors. And now we have a realistic way of loving each other and loving life through it all. 

I will never stop reading romance. I did have to completely deconstruct what I had taken away from them. I write my own story. The romance novels are just that, a side story to my already beautiful love with Nick. 

With Love,

Tay