Issue #68: How to romanticise your life

'I will never have this version of me again, let me slow down and be with her,' writes Rupi Kaur. A practical guide to falling in love with your everyday life, from small pleasures to scene-setting.

My name is Francesca, and I’m a romantic.

In my teens and twenties, I thought romance belonged to romantic relationships (I mean, the clue’s in the name). And so I sought it in the embryonic stages of every one I had. Everything was exciting, from the sharing of brunch plates, half of my Eggs Benedict for a slice of your avocado toast loveyousomuch, to the dangled carrot of a first holiday together (Rome… or Paris?).

Each relationship represented the Petri dish for the romantic life I wanted, one which could only be lived as a couple. The pressure was on. Dreary old reality – incompatible schedules or tastes or indeed personalities – inevitably got in the way. Yet, I clung on to my belief that the setting for romance lay within the cosy confines of coupledom. 

Today, the kids know better. ‘Romanticising your life’, a TikTok phenomenon (71.1 million views) coined by Gen Z, is a practice of falling in love with life itself, rather than another person. It was popularised by a viral New York Times feature written by Christina Caron, and it’s the title of a new book by journalist

Beth McColl

.

Romanticising your life means you look for moments of beauty, appreciate the small things throughout your day and (crucially) celebrate what you already have, rather than delaying gratification for an elusive Someday.

It makes me think of the dream scene in 500 Days of Summer, where Tom (Joseph Gordon Levitt), having finally done the deed with titular character Summer (Zooey Deschanel), skips through Los Angeles’ Grand Park smiling at strangers, breaking into spontaneous dance, pausing to bat a ball and greet an animated cartoon bird. It’s that joie de vivre applied to the everyday, not just the morning after.

Noticing the little things

While I’m not on board with everything my younger counterparts are doing (the mullet revival springs to mind), romanticising your life appeals. It provides a vocabulary for something I’ve begun to do instinctively over the past few years: