Last week, at my friend’s birthday dinner in Brooklyn, her boyfriend stood up to perform a toast. Following his little speech, and while holding the attention of basically the entire restaurant, he turned to her and said, “And by the way, will you be my wife?” In shock, she said yes, but twenty minutes later was medicating with a flask of vodka in the bathroom. “I wanted him to ask me, but not like that,” she said. “How embarrassing!” She had envisioned him popping the question during a quiet stroll along the East River one evening, or, better yet, through a discreet note left for her in a book. It was so strange: these two people are clearly so in love, yet when it comes to romance, it’s like they’re speaking two different languages.
We all have our own personal definitions of romance, whether we’re conscious of it or not. Just because you have good sexual and intellectual chemistry with someone doesn’t necessarily mean the same things make your hearts flutter. My girlfriend, for instance, has a very traditional notion of romance—born, she says, of a childhood spent watching Humphrey Bogart movies. Flowers, chocolates, candlelit dinners, awkwardly chivalrous efforts to open doors for me: being with her is like Hallmark IRL. No matter how many times I tell her that I don’t like flowers—that the gesture seem so formulaic, and therefore not genuine—she just keeps on buying me flowers. She argues that I’m not romantic; I think I can be, just in a way that’s less, well . . . cheesy.
I’ll admit that I’m from a school that’s probably self-aware to a fault—my constant irony inhibits me from truly being present in the moment or sincerely, unself-consciously enjoying nice things for what they are. But seriously, how am I expected to enjoy having my hair washed in the bathtub when, while it’s happening, I can’t stop thinking that I’m in a bad remake of that scene in The Notebook?
Personally, I’ve always viewed romance as something quite practical: working relationships give me a total heart-boner. The love story of Marina Abramović and her partner, Ulay, as told in The Artist Is Present, HBO’s 2012 documentary on the artist—the decade they spent pushing the boundaries of performance art together—epitomized the height of romance for me. Or the way Joan Didion describes her relationship with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, in The Year of Magical Thinking—how they always helped to edit each other’s work, how wonderful it was to be with someone who so thoroughly understood what she did and what her life was about. And while some people might cringe at the idea of incorporating professional ego into a sacred, loving dynamic, couples like these make me think that being a creative duo, while also having great sex, is the romantic holy grail.
Recently, my girlfriend and I directed a music video together, which I found very romantic. And sometimes, when she writes important emails, I’ll check them over for spelling and grammatical errors before she sends them, since English is her second language; for some reason, I’ve always found these email moments very romantic, too, although I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have a clue that I feel this way, and would probably think I’m crazy for saying so.
It’s funny: when a romantic gesture isn’t blatantly obvious, it can sometimes be lost in translation. My friend I’ll call John, a 31-year-old artist, has experienced this many times over. “Something I consider very romantic is introducing a girl to parts of my routine,” he told me. “Like, ‘This is my favorite coffee shop,’ or, ‘When I’m feeling stressed, I like to come sit on this park bench.’ It can be simple things, but it’s about wanting someone to be a part of what makes your everyday life special.” This type of gesture can often go completely unappreciated, he said. “I recently showed a girl my favorite bench, which actually felt quite intimate to me,” he said. “But she was just like, ‘Eww, this bench smells like pee.’ And then my world crumbled.”
For this reason, according to John, if you want to show affection to a new partner, it can sometimes be more effective to rely on a cliché. “A romantic language is like a code,” he explained, “but if someone hasn’t learned your code yet, they might not even realize that you’re being affectionate. Sometimes you have to go by Hollywood’s playbook, and do things that everybody understands are romantic, otherwise your actions can be misinterpreted, or go overlooked, and then you just end up in the ‘Friend Zone.’”
My ex-boyfriend and I suffered from a similar type of communication failure. He was one of those typically talented yet antisocial, Asperger-y scientists who couldn’t relate to many “normal” human emotions—empathy, jealousy—and therefore didn’t follow “normal” relationship protocol. It continually upset me that he wouldn’t reciprocate my romantic gestures. It was beyond him to offer to edit my writing; I legit didn’t even get a single spontaneous deli coffee in our two-plus years together.
Once, this now ex asked me if I wanted to come with him on a mycological hunt—a.k.a., to wander around Central Park with a bunch of nerds in khakis searching for fungi—starting at 8 a.m. one Saturday. Of course I said I would rather die. But after some pushing on his part, I agreed to go, then complained through most of it: Why, I wanted to know, did we always have to do what he wanted to do? It wasn’t until afterward—when he explained that the invitation wasn’t intended to bore me, but rather to include me in a special part of his life, a part of his life that not many others got to see—that I understood that the offer, in and of itself, was a gesture of affection. I suddenly felt like a total bitch.
One of the most powerful pieces of love advice I’ve ever heard was in a video interview with a 73-year-old costume designer, Roberta Haze. In the video, from a documentary in progress called Monogamy & Its Discontents, Haze says that the key to a good relationship is being able to accept that everyone expresses affection differently. “I’m trying to learn, at 73, to believe and feel and internalize that somebody loves me their way,” she says. Being able to do this involves trust, she argues. Even if your partner isn’t doing the demonstrative things you have in your agenda, she says, you have to “let them love you the way they love you, not the way you want to be loved.”
What Haze is essentially saying is that we need to learn each other’s romantic languages, and not try to impose our own language on someone else. In my case, it might do me good to indulge in some roses, and accept that even though the gesture feels like a cliché, it’s coming from a genuine place of love. And on the flip side, when we’re dating someone whose idea of romance isn’t so straightforward, we might learn to pay closer attention, so as not to overlook their more understated gestures of affection. My girlfriend put it well. “It’s like having sex,” she said. “It can be awkward at first, but you soon learn what your partner likes, they learn what gets you off, and eventually things just start to flow.”
For Valentine’s Day this year, I was expecting flowers. You can imagine my surprise when I opened my present—a pink box with red ribbon, of course—to find a very chic butt plug. To reciprocate, I suggested we light some candles before christening it. It felt like we were finally beginning to speak the same language.
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever. Read her most recent post, “Is Instagram ruining your love life?”.
Hair: Joey George; Makeup: Morgane Martini
On Sciortino: Proenza Schouler black embroidered dress, price upon request; Proenza Schouler, NYC, 212.585.3200
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