i am naught but baby, yet i too have thoughts about love
APR 10, 2026
inkhaven
So. Many people have been talking about love recently. Should we be exposing children to romance movies? Are sparks fake?
I am but a humble 21-year-old who is going to cringe extremely hard upon rereading this post five years from now. But I have tried dating people, some of them kind of seriously. I'm currently in love with the person I hope to live out my life with. Surely these are qualifications enough to have some thoughts about love.
i really like bf, and the reason is a feeling in my heart
First things first: The "it's a feeling in my heart, bro" thing is totally real, and you should trust it.
I ended up with my current partner, let's call him E, through an impromptu late-night "date" (story for another time), during which he spent 4 hours egregiously flirting with me.1 Over the next couple of days, I fell like a brick dropped off of a bungee tower, and the rest is history.
But even as I was falling, I did not know why I liked him. Everything in my brain was telling me that I shouldn't! But for whatever reason, my heart2 was very fucking sure that this guy was perfect and right for me. It was to the point that within 2 months of dating, I told a friend of mine that I'd take a $10k even-money bet that E and I would end up married, based on vibes only.3
And even now, after fighting and wronging and being wronged, even facing the fact that we might not be forever, he still feels right.
After experiencing this, I do not see the point of trying to build a life with someone who does not feel like this.
i have liked other people though, what gives?
To be fair, "this guy feels right" and "I like this guy" are two slightly different feelings. I know I experienced nonsensical "I like this guy" feelings for my exes, who ended up not being right for me. There are universes where I confused those feelings, got married, and ended up unhappy.
I guess this is what Aria Schreker means when she says that
[…] that passion is not necessarily a sign that your relationship might be good. In the real world, your paramour probably isn’t a fairy king who has kidnapped you against your will or a vampire who has to wrestle with his desire to drink your blood. In the real world (or, as I reflect upon these examples, in the fictional world too), the obstacles that create yearning are anti-correlated with domestic felicity.
I believe that this failure mode exists, and I can see how media depictions of romance can exacerbate it. You get "I like this guy" feelings in real life and think that's exactly what makes a relationship work.
But I don't know if harping on "romance in media is always fake! don't believe it!" is the solution. If I hadn't been sold romantic idealism growing up, I wouldn't have had any idea that my relationships could be better. In fact, thinking that media representations of romance were inaccurate was what kept me in bad relationships in the first place. I'd think "well, I can't expect my relationship to be anything like what's in these webtoons. I guess this is love and I just need to thug it out."
This is so very very wrong. If you have to thug it out every day of your relationship, what are you even doing?????
I am glad that the hope for a sweet webtoon romance kept me from pushing through.
it's not about the flowers
Aella says that
[…] we have been so immersed in romance-porn that the idea of buying flowers for a woman is seen as what romance ought to be. The romance narrative has become romance, and rejecting the narrative becomes rejecting romance itself. We have lost the ability to distinguish!
I agree that this is bad. You should not have to complete the Buy Flowers quest in order to get access to the Do a Romance questline.
However, I am not convinced that this actually happens in real life? When I said that I hoped for a sweet webtoon romance, I didn't really mean that I wanted to go thorugh the "classically romantic" motions that I had seen. I already knew that flowers and candlelit dinners weren't really my thing! What I really wanted was to have a romance that let me understand what all these people were talking about.
Maybe I'm just the weird one here (I wouldn't be surprised, tell me if I am), but I never took media depictions of romance as high-fidelity representations of reality. Just as sit-coms are exaggerated versions of reality designed to be funny, depictions of romance are exaggerated versions of reality designed to get you to feel things. Nice to watch, and probably has a kernel of something someone has experienced at some point, but not a description of real life.
Besides, even though romance media may not be accurate at the "what do people actually do when falling in love" level, it's still pretty effective at communicating what it feels like to be in love. I think it's worth hoping for a romance that elicits those kind of emotions.
love is pretty
Based on my n=1 experience, love exists, and it's just as pretty as everyone says it is. It's worth the trying and the failing and the being confused. It's also worth doing some dumb things for (within reason).
I guess that I am not living a movie romance. But I do get to wake up every day to my favorite person in the whole world, and I get to watch his eyes light up when he sees me. We wander through life together, hand-in-hand, with a promise that we'll stop to smell the roses together.
To be honest, it's much better than what the movies promised. Sitting in the "it feels right" has been the most beautiful experience of my life, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
I love you, E. See you for dinner tonight!