Hopeless Romantic Society

An essay on love & romcoms

In her song ‘First Love/Late Spring,’ Mitski laments, “And I was so young when I behaved twenty-five. Yet now, I find I've grown into a tall child.”

When my 24th birthday came around last month, my mother reminded me that when asked about my age as a child, I would tweak it and tell people I was a year older. Being born at the end of the year is never fun when you’re 12, and your classmates have entered the coveted first stage of teenagedom. However, I stopped doing that because lying about being 13 is not the same as being an adult lying about being 25. 

With the onset of my mid-twenties, I face what all people confront at 24: mortality and youth.

“Will I get those feared hereditary illnesses after all?” 

“Maybe I should take up yoga again?”

“What the fuck am I doing with my life?” 

Despite living on my own, with sky-high bills and stressful landlords, I still felt more like a child than I had ever felt living under my parents' roof. There's no fun in perpetually feeling 17— when was maturity going to kick in?

Maybe part of my immaturity resulted from going through a transitional period of my life both publicly (because I tweeted through the pain) and privately. While social puberty in your twenties is not as physically altering as growing armpit hair for the first time, it is equally as embarrassing as wearing a training bra at 11. Part of that social puberty includes coming to terms with love and all its side effects. 

A few months ago, I wrote about young people in the workplace for DAZED. My essay discussed how 2022 was my year from hell, which led me to resign from a terrible media job and move back home. What I left out of the essay included dealing with long COVID, having an insane housemate situation (I got Single White Female'd) and working through a breakup. I told myself that, eventually, I would write about the breakup, so I could let my heartbreak out on paper instead of letting it fester inside me.

In the same way that so many literary greats (or writers featured in Modern Love) have done before me, I would use my failure in love to my advantage.

Ultimately, I decided against that since the level of vulnerability required to allow strangers to judge my romantic woes felt impossible. Why should I put myself or anyone else on a metaphorical chopping block where we would both be sentenced to social media exile?

The last thing I wanted was for my experiences to become an AITA (Am I The Asshole) or r/relationships post circulated on a Twitter thread where people debate how much each party contributed to a breakdown of the relationship without considering any of the humanity involved. It wouldn't matter if I wrote about it with grace or tried to be fair— divulging would be seen as a revenge attempt rather than a cathartic release. Even if I blamed myself, examined dynamics, or self-reflected, my pain would turn into meme fodder. The mere idea of bringing such grief to a place that rewards behaviour, such as the West Elm Caleb witchhunt, gave me a migraine. 

There I was, miserable and desperately seeking an outlet. I tried everything I could think of. I did self-care, hung out with friends, wrote terrible poetry and dyed my hair repeatedly—nothing worked. I felt plagued by misery and guilt, two emotions that do not bode well for someone with BPD.

Finally, in early June, as another terrible London heatwave set in, I watched something I hadn't seen in years: Nora Ephron’s classic 1989 film When Harry Met Sally. 

At last, I was in tears, and the relief set in.  

That night I rediscovered something I had forgotten about myself: I love rom-coms. I mean, it's easier, isn't it? You feel the highs and lows without any of the emotional baggage reality tends to bring. Splitting the bill is no longer necessary— your heartfelt tears and popcorn are more than enough. For a period in my early 20s, I tried to convince myself that I was a serious person and that I liked serious movies. Despite my dislike of Amy Dunne's decontextualised 'Cool Girl' monologue, I admit it holds true. I aspired to be a 'cool girl'. I wanted men to like me, so I didn't tell them I enjoyed watching silly romance films. If I did, it wouldn't be without making excuses for guilty pleasure watching. I wanted them to think I was as interesting as their top 100 IMDb films of all time list. Stupid, I know. 

Yet, as I sat in my heat-laden room and watched Harry run after Sally on New Years' Eve to say he loved her, I felt electrified. That’s the thing about great films and, ultimately, great screenwriting; it helps uncover parts of yourself that have long been hidden. I forgot that I was a hopeless romantic and that part of me had settled in most of my experiences with love thus so far. 

When it comes to romance, I feel stuck. You can't wriggle yourself out of this kind of stuck with soap and oil. It’s the type of stuck where whenever I attempt to alter my position, it all caves in—crushing my body into the ground and rendering me dead upon arrival. I’m at the ‘right’ age and now have the freedom to figure out what I want in a potential partner, but part of me feels as if I don’t know what to look out for because I didn't spend my teenage years developing a perfectly crafted radar for bullshit. Not to mention that any romantic advice wasn’t going to be taken from those in my vicinity— romance has not been a part of my genetic makeup.

Despite this, I have always enjoyed romance as a genre. In TV, movies, and books, I found what I imagined the perfect partnership would be like. Reading about crushes in Jacqueline Wilson's Girls series as a child made my heart flutter. Towards the end of my childhood, I started taking the soap operas my mother watched more seriously. Yearning connects people across continents and cultures— it's a universal language. However, it wasn't until I watched When Harry Met Sally for the first time that everything clicked; I was in love with love. 

The reality of my teenage years wasn't full of puppy love. As discussed in my essay failsafe, I did not engage in romantic pursuits until my late teens-early 20s. There was always more ease in reading or watching a romantic story than living it. Yet, even with my dreaded experience with the boy who shall remain nameless, I realised that I had opened a door in my heart that could no longer be bolted shut. No matter how much I tried to convince myself that remaining alone would be easier, the taste of love awoke my senses like someone rising from the dead. I spoke in riddles of yearning and desire as if it were a mother tongue. 

And when yearning occurs in a Muslim household, there is only one outcome: marriage.

Years ago, I read Love in a Headscarf, a memoir by author Shelina Janmohamed. In the book, she examines the trope within her own life as a Muslim woman who wants to get married. She writes about having an expectation of flurrying romance sweeping off her of her feet and examining how that co-exists with the Islamic idea of the one where we have been “created in pairs” (Adh-Dhariyat 51:49). A common trope in romance media is the idea of the one—the person you’re fated to be with. The main character goes through trials and tribulations to find them, and by the end of the film/book/show, both people realise they’re in love with each other. Of course, this is different to real life, depending on your cultural background and the religiosity of your family. However, as Janmohamed states in the book and many of my Muslim friends and I have discussed, there’s an expectation that you meet the one at 21, get married and live a happy life. Sounds easy enough, right? 

The weird thing is that many of our parents didn't necessarily meet, marry, and have children by that age, but there’s still this looming invisible pressure on you. For me, it’s an unintended consequence of growing up in Saudi Arabia, where my classmates and friends spoke about getting married at the ages of 20 and 21. I remember telling people what ages my parents were when they got married and them being visibly surprised. My father married when he was 25, one year older than I am now. In contrast, my mother was 30 years old—a not-so-typical age pairing between two Muslims from incredibly different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. 

My parents have never prioritised marriage in my life. Unlike girls I knew, I never had marriage dangling over my head as an expectation to fulfil early on—instead, they focused on my education and career goals. My mother wanted me to have my own life before settling down. And yet, I still feel like Charlotte from Pride and Prejudice (2005) when she says, "I'm 27 years old. I've no money and no prospects. I'm already a burden to my parents.”

As much as I know that bringing religion into an essay will most likely garner the attention of those who see nuance as a garnish rather than an essential component, I would do myself no favours by hiding my feelings about marriage. I mean, I own a Pinterest board with the title 'I'm not getting married, but IF I DID.’  

In When Harry Met Sally, the lead characters meet in their early 20s and do not get married until their mid-30s. Watching the film on that night in June did re-confirm my want for love, but it also made me realise that I had been rushing into things for the sake of not dying alone. I gripped my hooks into those who showed me care without pondering if I needed to be anywhere near a relationship at this point in my life. I’ve seen women in my life sucked into relationships and spat back out as shells of their former selves. I would not survive the process. 

Who could put up with me for years on end? I need to be cared for and held like a fragile being. I want someone who will hold me upright like the neck of a newborn babe and keep my flimsy bones from falling apart. Taking on my emotional baggage would make anyone buckle to their knees. 

I fear making a wrong choice and living to regret it for the rest of my days. My attempts at finding the one have failed disastrously, and I would rather die than ask to be set up, so instead, I spend my days writing. It soothes me and quiets the anxiety swirling around the toilet bowl I call a brain. I’ve even written my own Muslim rom-com. And even though I know it will probably never see the light, there’s a sense of power that comes from writing stories like that. A writer's ability to materialise love out of thin air is magical. It also feels a lot safer than a personal essay about a breakup. You take the elements of the real story and place them into a fictional one instead, r/relationships be damned. 

What I’ve also realised since June is that love can exist in multiple forms, from my friends, my family and my work. The love and devotion I pour into my words allow them to thrive in the cold and hostile environment of my Google Drive. I watch romantic comedies far more often now and feel less internal shame about it. Watching romance on screen may not be a liberating experience for us all, but it certainly is for me.  

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