How to Be a True Romantic

Embracing the romance of everyday life includes cultivating curiosity for unexpected moods and unfamiliar spirits.

The Moonstone Effect (1959) by Dorothea Tanning

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the balance between daring to believe that you deserve joy (a radical belief, when you’ve settled for less for so long) and focusing on joy so much that it becomes just another form of overachieving that distracts you from the mundane satisfactions of daily life. This morning, I stumbled on this post, which originally appeared in Ask Molly in December of 2022, and I was surprised to find that it addressed a lot of my current fixations, so I’m sharing it with you here. I particularly love the swerve at the end that includes Craig Wright’s observation that “Life is too strange, sad, and scandalously ungainly to be characterized by something as unitary and singular as JOY.”

When I lived in San Francisco, I briefly dated an Irish guy, a house painter. He had fucked up teeth and he drank too much, but he had a great sense of humor and he was incredibly romantic. He painted houses and he was romantic about the houses he painted, mostly Victorian and Edwardian houses with huge windows and complicated color schemes. He was romantic about San Francisco and romantic about Dublin, where he was from, and he was romantic about sailboats and bridges and all large bodies of water and sunrise and fog and sunsets and strong coffee and that chill that goes straight through your coat in the dead of winter.

At the time I was also a drunk, also incredibly romantic, and I lived in the Castro in an Edwardian apartment that was painted pink, lavender, gold, and white. Over the door of the first floor the owners had painted in cursive: “Brighten a Corner Where You Are.” My roommate and I used to joke that we wanted to change the words to “Sluts’ Dreams Do Come True!” There was a bustling leather bar down the street and a café packed with hot, chatty men across the street and Hot ‘n’ Hunky Burger was a few blocks away, so sluts’ dreams were coming true all around us back then. We believed in them and in ourselves. We were full of big dreams.

Dreams aside, my roommate didn’t drink as much as I did and she definitely didn’t drag random Irish guys with bad teeth home from parties. She disapproved of these things and she didn’t love the fact that I spent most of my non-working hours in my room, playing guitar, writing some songs that were pretty good and other songs that were just half-assed imitations of PJ Harvey.

I didn’t care. I had a six-foot tall window in my room that faced West, and I could watch the sun set or watch the fog roll in or watch the hot ‘n’ hunky sluts mingling cheerfully across the street and I could write songs about my feelings, unabashedly romantic, self-pitying, lustful songs that didn’t embarrass me yet. I was firmly committed to not being embarrassed by myself back then, a state that can’t last forever, so you have to relish it while it lasts.

My roommate did like my Irish boyfriend in spite of all this because it was impossible not to like that guy. Every time we hung out, he drank a bottle of red wine or several pints of Guinness (“Ahhh, so cliché, an Irishman ordering Guinness! Might as well dress like a Leprechaun!”) and chain smoked half a pack of American Spirits and then he’d tell incredibly dramatic stories about growing up in a family of seven with a single mother who was also a drunk. “Now you’ve just described half of the Irish guys I know,” you might say, but trust me, this guy was special. He was extremely smart and extremely exuberant.

I loved listening to him talk. But he didn’t just talk, he rhapsodized. He was in love with so many things. He knew how to hate people and love them at the same time, a skill that I didn’t learn for decades to come. He would describe an irritating coworker, going on and on about what a prick he was, and then he’d pull out some small detail about the guy that proved that you could never, ever cross him or let him down because he was just a sweet guy at heart, just a wonderfully sweet guy that you could never ever turn your back on. By the end of his story, you’d be shaking your head right along with him, lamenting the absolute mercilessness of anyone who’d turn their back on such a pure soul.

He didn’t own a car and he was thrilled when he found out that I did. In the morning after a night out drinking, he’d insist that we buy triple lattés and scones and then get in the car and drive and talk. There was nothing in the world better than drinking coffee and driving and talking, according to him. So we would get very, very caffeinated and drive over the Bay Bridge, through Oakland, south to San Jose or over to Walnut Creek, through the suburbs and out to the garlic farms of the central valley.

As we drove we usually listened to Van Morrison, which was also a cliché and lamentable according to my Irish boyfriend, but it was necessary because there was nothing he loved to rhapsodize about more than Van Morrison. He had read all of the biographies of Van Morrison. He knew every story and every controversy and every dispute surrounding Van Morrison. He told me the story of each song, down to the lyrics: “TB Sheets” was about Van Morrison’s girlfriend who died of TB, extremely sad and also very ambivalent, very conflicted, because he loved her but he didn’t want to get sick. It was a long song but you had to listen to every line, because it was a heartbreaker, absolutely the saddest and also the most honest song you could ever write about someone dying right in front of your eyes.

So, open up the window and let me breathe
I said, open up the window and let me breathe
I'm looking down to the street below, Lord, I cried for you
I cried, I cried for you, oh Lord

That’s the thing about someone dying, though, isn’t it? You’re devastated but you still want to live.

I fell in love with Van Morrison and stayed in love with him after that. Of course I’d always loved “Sweet Thing,” and “Brown-Eyed Girl” — pretty songs, easy songs. But now I was in love with the difficulty of “Slim Slow Slider” and “Madame George” and “Almost Independence Day,” songs that burrowed into the most conflicted, embarrassing core of experience, but somehow remained incredibly romantic.

That’s a magic trick, making ambivalence feel romantic. Because anyone can make falling in love or losing love romantic. Anyone can sing sweetly about missing their ex. But not everyone can write about watching their ex with her young son, “putting on his little red shoes.” It’s hard to write about the romance of things that don’t belong to you, or write about feelings that make you seem a little creepy. It’s hard to write about feeling ashamed of your own curiosity, or embarrassed by your own survival instincts.

It's hard to write about your core self, that doesn’t always want to honor other people’s wishes and is rarely satisfied. But you have to make some space for that core self, and sing about it, because when it is satisfied, that’s the most satisfaction you ever get to feel. That’s the satisfaction that makes you rhapsodize without worrying about how stupid you sound. That’s the satisfaction that makes you drive all the way to San Jose and back, wasting your whole day, listening to stories that make you realize that the life you’ve led up until then has been very, very small. And all at once, in that car speeding across miles of farmland — empty paper cups, open sky, cigarette smoke drifting out of each window into the cold air — you know you want a bigger life than the one you’ve been living.

***

This morning I woke up to a newsletter post titled “George to the World.” In it, my friend Craig Wright rhapsodizes romantically about Van Morrison’s song “Madame George.” And when I say that he rhapsodizes romantically, I mean he RHAPSODIZES ROMANTICALLY:

Our hero spies Madame George playing dominoes and his attention STICKS to her. Even after she’s announced her fear that the cops are coming and she drops all her drugs out the window and he knows he should go, his attention “worries her” like a thumb on a stone. 

And you know you gotta go on that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row
Throwing pennies at the bridges down below, and the rain, hail, sleet, and snow, say goodbye to Madame George, dry your eye for Madame George
Wonder why for Madame George…

He can’t quit her. Some young men arrive and go straight to Madame George, and (this is me filling in gaps here, creatively) our hero, seeing THEIR regard for this liminal being, suddenly sees himself in them and has to go. There’s something about his own fascination which has unsettled him. We get it. 

I’m conflicted about quoting more of his post, because you need to read the whole thing yourself, including the digressions and disclaimers at the beginning, but apparently Van Morrison backed away from the obvious story of the song, claiming that the original title of “Madame George” was “Madame Joy.” Craig examines what’s messed up about that:

When push came to shove (and it always does), Van Morrison knew that the deliverer of his theme could never be MADAME JOY. Life is too strange, sad and scandalously ungainly to be characterized by something as unitary and singular as JOY. The salutary strangeness of the moniker MADAME GEORGE is a far better name for that unfamiliar spirit that sees us seeing and feels us feeling, that wears its own idiosyncrasies proudly (because it knows it has no choice) and is always inviting us from across the room to wear our own with a similar panache for the two best reasons — life is short and WE WANT TO.

Reading these words made me realize that I’ve been blocked lately because I’m trying to write MADAME JOY instead of writing MADAME GEORGE. You write MADAME JOY when you refuse to relish the ambivalent, conflicted, unexpected layers of your experience, and you turn your back on your idiosyncrasies instead. Maybe once you were committed to not being embarrassed by yourself, but you’re not there anymore.

And maybe that’s what happened to Van Morrison. He was a deeply romantic rhapsodizer who took all of his most complicated feelings and wrote songs about them, but after too many years of doing that out in the open, he grew into a cranky guy who would dare to claim that a song about a magical, loving presence in drag is actually just a song about JOY™.

I don’t want to be like that. One of the things I hate the most in life is this impulse to hide inside declawed, defanged versions of what’s real. If you occupy that bland realm, you never find yourself reflecting on mixed feelings or on survival itself. You will not be rhapsodizing, because rhapsodizing is imprecise and unpredictable. You will not be romantic, because romance is sloppy and ambitious and humiliating.

When I think about the romantic rhapsodizers I’ve known, they all light up in my memory and I want to write them each a very romantic letter about how much they continue to matter to me. Whenever I back away from them I’m also backing away from myself, backing away from the love that loves to love the love that loves, backing away from the rough, dirty details that make up a life.

Sometimes it takes hard work to be proud of your wretched, inconsistent, idiotic idiosyncrasies. It’s easy for years and then it’s very hard out of the blue. But a true romantic does it anyway. A true romantic makes space for love and hate in the same room. A true romantic says you can never turn your back on a pure heart. You buy the strongest coffee and you drive as long as it takes.

---

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Here’s another Ask Molly I wrote this morning, also free. Please consider supporting this column (and all of my work) by subscribing today.

Send your feedback and advice letters to askpolly@protonmail.com.