Everything Is Romantic, Right?
Here’s the thing about being a woman with a grip problem: you know you’re doing it. That feeling you had when you were little, loving the baby bird your dad got you, never went away. Don’t hold it too tight; it might die. You’re not delusional. You feel your own fingers tightening around the thing, the person, the moment, the feeling. And somewhere in your brain a small, exhausted voice says you’re going to crush this, and you agree completely, and you do not let go.
Charli understands this. Caroline understands this. They wrote a song about it that sounds like falling in love at a wine bar while your therapist’s voice echoes in the back of your skull, reminding you about your attachment patterns.
I feel smothered by logistics.
God. GOD. The way that line lives in my chest. Because romance isn’t killed by tragedy, is it? It’s not killed by dramatic betrayals or third-act revelations. It’s killed by scheduling. By “when are you free,” “I have a thing on thursday,” and “let’s circle back next week.” It’s killed by the slow bureaucratic erosion of two people trying to fit their chaos into Google Calendar.
You want to be the kind of woman who is soft. Who holds things gently. Who trusts enough to open her hands and let love sit there, unpinned, free to stay or go.
But you’re not that woman.
You’re the woman who needs her fingerprints on everything. Who has to touch it to believe it. Who has to leave evidence. Physical, emotional, indelible. She was here, that this happened, that it mattered. Because if you don’t leave marks, did it even happen? If you don’t grip, will it stay?
The answer is sometimes no. Things leave. People leave. Time (that bitch, that relentless, undefeated bitch) takes everything eventually regardless of how hard you hold on.
And you know this.
You know this and you still can’t stop.
Am I in a slump? Am I playing back time? Did I lose my perspective?
This is the late night catechism of every woman who has ever wanted too much. The ritual self-interrogation. Are you crazy or just sad? Are you dramatic or just paying attention? Are you too much or is everyone else not enough?
The song asks, “Everything’s still romantic, right?”
And that question mark is doing all the heavy lifting. That question mark is a woman standing in her own apartment at 11 PM, wondering if she still believes in the thing she’s built her whole identity around. Wondering if the ache is still beautiful or just clinical now. Wondering if falling in love is still possible when you know exactly how falling works, when you’ve memorized the physics of your own descent.
Here’s what nobody tells you about being a romantic who is also a realist: it doesn’t cancel out. You don’t become neutral. You become both, all the time, simultaneously. You fall in love knowing it might end. You grip knowing you might crush. You want the fairy tale while narrating all the ways it could collapse.
That’s not cynicism. That’s experience. That’s being a woman who has lived enough to know the cost of things and still reaches for them anyway.
The claw marks aren’t violence. They’re documentation. They’re proof that you were here, that you tried, that you loved with your whole stupid desperate heart even though you knew better.
Caroline’s voice in this song, that ethereal, alien, beautiful instrument, sounds like what it feels like to be too much and know it and not know how to be less. Charli’s voice sounds like wanting anyway. Together they made something that understands the specific loneliness of being a woman who loves hard in a world that keeps asking her to be chill.
I don’t know how to be chill.
I don’t know how to hold something without memorizing it. Without needing to know it’s real. Without pressing my fingerprints into it like evidence at a crime scene. I was here. This happened. You can’t take that.
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And still, STILL, after everything, after the logistics and the slumps and the lost perspective, I need to fall in love. Not want. Need. Like oxygen. Like a biological requirement. Like the most embarrassing truth about myself that I can’t outgrow no matter how many years pass or how many times it goes wrong.
Everything’s still romantic, right?
Yes.
Again is the most romantic word in the English language.
Fall in love again and again.
Falling in love is the only time I feel like I’m touching another person’s actual soul, before the walls go up, before the disappointments calcify, before we become two people managing a shared life instead of two people discovering each other.
Discovery is the drug.
And like all drugs, the high doesn’t last.
So you need another hit.
Again.
I may have fallen in love (really, truly, all-the-way fallen) more times than I should admit. More times than is probably advisable for a single cardiovascular system. Each time I thought: this is it, this is the last fall, this is where I land forever. And each time, eventually, the falling stopped and the being started and I felt the ground beneath my feet and I knew, in that terrible knowing way, that I would someday need to fall again.
Not because he wasn’t enough.
Because I am not enough. For myself. Without the falling.
There’s something too awake in me that needs the freefall to feel real. That needs the uncertainty, the risk, the exhilarating terror of maybe. Settled love is safe. Falling love is dangerous. And I have never, not once, chosen safety when danger was on the menu.
The romance isn’t in the falling.
It’s in the still wanting to fall.
And still (this is the part that breaks me), Charli is asking if it’s romantic. Still, she wants it to be romantic. Still, underneath the exhaustion and the doubt and the fingerprints on everything, there’s a woman who believes in the thing. Who refuses to let it become just logistics. Who will claw-mark her way back to romance even if she has to drag the whole relationship there herself.
That’s not delusion.
That’s faith.
The specific, stubborn, unglamorous faith of a woman who knows exactly how hard love is and chooses it anyway. Again. And again. And again.
Everything’s still romantic.
Not because it feels romantic.
Because she decides it is.
