De-romanticize your life
i don’t want butterflies, i want peace.
If you’ve been online lately, you’ve probably seen someone in your feed encouraging you to “romanticize your life.” The hashtag on tik tok alone, has received millions of views and encourages people to make the mundane more festive by making the little things in life more special and unique. As a pisces woman, I get it. Romanticism and creating made-up scenarios in my head, is my cardio. And while actively trying to make the small trivial moments in life feel more exciting, for some of us, romanticizing is not a healthy strategy, it can be dysfunctional.
If romanticizing people, relationship, jobs, and childhood was at the olympics, I’d have a gold medal. While seeing the best in people, and focussing on the best moments in past relationships can be a positive character trait, when we have dysfunctional hope, we see qualities that don’t even exist. And I don’t think this makes you a nice person, to the contrary, this can make you feel like a crazy person. If you feel betrayed by someone’s personality not living up the one that you made up for them in your head, you’re being kind to yourself, or them. “I just really see their potential, what’s wrong with that?” I used to say, as a way to justify my own controlling behavior and hold on to the ideal I had carefully created for them without their knowledge or input. I’ve come to understand that this was a convenient story for me because it didn’t require any self-reflection about why I was so committed to their “potential” in the first place and whether the goals I had set for them, were even something that they wanted for themselves. Writing an entire book devoted to the potential that I saw in men, should have been a dead giveaway! And while I steered away from being prescriptive about what men should do in For the Love of Men, I wasn’t always keeping things on my side of the street in my relationships with them.
But there’s also a primitive reason that we romanticize people, especially when they hurt us. Creating a story about someone’s harmful behavior, makes us feel like if we can understand it, we can prevent it. Intellectualizing neglect or abuse, becomes a way to keep us safe from it. What makes this hard to shake, is that this isn’t even a couscious behavior, it’s often automatic. And for many of us, it started in childhood which means it’s deeply engrained. I know that for me, it shows up as self-blame (instead of self-compassion) when I’m treated poorly. If something bad happens, my first reflex is to believe that I caused it. This is often where the root of defensiveness is born. While it’s self-destructive, I’ve come to see it a protective mechanism. I used to reject it and become angry when I would see it pop up in my life. As I’ve written before, it can be infuriating to have to continue healing parts that we feel we have already healed. But when I accept it, and see it as a part of me that is trying to protect me, the feeling can dissipate much more quickly.
Believing that you cause people’s actions and moods is also a common symptom of codependency, so while boundary-setting can be especially hard, it is extremely important if you struggle with this. I wrote a whole essay about the importance of staying in your own hoola hoop, as a guiding principle for relationships to avoid toxic relationshuops. Being attached to other people’s moods or decisions is a recipe for exhaustion because your internal sense of peace and happiness depends on a person you ultimately have no control over.
One solution that I’ve found for this, is to deromanticize my life. For me, this looks like a radical commitment to the boring, and resisting the urge to make it more enticing or exhilarating. In dating, friendships and even work, I’m following harmony, instead of excitement. I don’t want butterflies, I want peace.