Is it escapist cope, is it something we seek, or is it something we open our eyes and see? Our understanding of romance is easily clouded. Maddie Phinney rolls back the sky.
I attribute my infatuation with all things romantic to an adolescent desire to escape the boredom of a Web 1.0 existence. In the pre-social media 1990s, my strongest emotional memory is of feeling bored. Desperate to transcend the humiliation of being ten years old, my little brain sopped up Aaron Spelling evening melodrama like a sponge. As I drew further into Dylan and Brenda’s stylized, soft-focus love story on Beverly Hills, 90210, a link between romance and a florid escape from the drudgery of adolescence was imprinted—and with it, a longing for my own adult romance, one that would mean I’d never be bored again.
As an adult, my first experiences of romantic love did feel this way—breathless, totalizing, and transportive. But when my first real love, a 10-year soul-connection, evolved into something that felt better as forever-friendship, that was also okay. I liked being single just as much as being partnered, and that first summer after the breakup, living on my own for the first time ever, I spent long balmy nights with friends on strangers’ porches, breathing in the heady smell of night blooming jasmine and sweating through our clothes. Buoyed by the positivity of a new future and the gentle delirium of an endless summer, I joined a once-niche community of those dating online. Maybe, I reasoned, if I found someone to share this new life I already enjoyed on my own, I would like it even more—perhaps there was a still-heightened version of romance waiting for me beyond what I pictured for myself.
Glassy-eyed and hopeful, those first experiences with online dating were imbued with a spirit of creative imagination. Remember the Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come, where he’s sent to a celestial paradise of his own design, painted in technicolor? With each match on the apps, my dopamine-fueled optimism limned a future as vivid. I became certain something was waiting for me just beyond reach, and the search for romantic love—something that following my breakup felt superfluous—grew urgent in its elusiveness. Around me, others spoke of their own isolation, but even these conversations happened over text; all at once being connected meant being tethered to a device, and I retreated further into my screen to escape feeling dissatisfied.
Something unidentifiable was missing, but the sense of romantic connection I was searching for wasn’t even relational in a 1-to-1 sense. It was atmospheric; a soft-filtered adolescent fantasy my little mind created to pass the time and fill the space between thoughts. Now a full-grown and frustrated millennial woman, I retraced my steps to the origins of that desire, past first love and being single and good and bad dates, back to a sensation that felt like a relic of childhood: boredom. As an adult, embracing boredom meant stepping back into the unknowable negative space I had stamped out like a lit cigarette with the easy distraction of my phone. Realizing I was wasting my most expansive creative imagination dreaming that someone might save me from my own dissatisfaction, I decided to decouple the search for romance from the search for another person. It was up to me to create the circumstances for romance to color my life the way it had before.
The first baby step was opening my front door and walking outside; after years of retreating deeper into isolating distraction, this simple task felt newly significant. I know what you’re thinking, but this wasn’t a stop-looking-and-it-will-find-you attempt to engineer an IRL meet-cute. No, I was facing the cold hard reality of raw integration into a world of creativity, love, and joy—in one of the most physically beautiful cities in the world—unmediated by the comfy anonymity and distance offered by a screen. Scary!
I set out on long, intentional walks in my neighborhood, leaving the house still tethered to a device containing the combined intelligence of the entire planet. I reasoned that my step counter was logging my mileage, but that data was irrelevant, I did not have “fitness goals.” My headphones were an artery, connecting me to an externalized organ. I warmed up with a 45-minute podcast before gingerly removing my earbuds to unite with my surroundings. Convinced the people around me were presenting themselves in order to be perceived, I looked blankly at the living avatars before adjusting to the shared reality of human bodies in physical space. It was springtime in L.A., the birds were chirping in Dolby Digital, and the temperature of my skin was the same as the surrounding atmosphere. I felt it cradling me.
Back at home, the romance I was searching for continued to reveal itself, and I developed rituals to reinforce a sense of spiritual unity with the physical world. Spraying perfume offered sensual pleasure that helped me feel present; both silent and invisible, this olfactory awareness became a grounding form of meditation. What was once a tool of seduction while I was dating became something else entirely; now it offered an ephemeral, daily reminder that I existed within a larger network of other blood-pumping bodies. Perfume became a sensual invitation to others—friends, strangers, lovers—to ground in this experience of aliveness together.
I also searched for romance in art, temporarily forgoing books and films that reflected the hyper-specificity of contemporary life in favor of those more timeless and expansive. I drew inspiration from characters naive to the numb, interconnected isolation I was feeling, reinforcing what I already knew: another life was still possible. These experiences were a different form of meditation, slower, softer, a reminder of the fundamentally romantic parts of being a human being. I even tried getting a landline, which was sweet, and brought me back to middle school, gabbing with my gal pals while we painted our nails, reinforcing our friendship in longhand rather than texting sound bites.
I’m still on the path to a romantic return. Fortified by deepening connections to everything around me, on early-morning hikes the world feels both larger and simpler. Clean, mineral-rich soil and my grassy galbanum perfume fill the air; an explosion of California poppies floods the surrounding Santa Monica Mountains; the trail is bathed in gauzy morning light, glowing with creativity and promise. At this hour, the air vibrates with a romantic frequency, and even when I’m too distracted to tune in, I know it's always there: steady, silent, and patiently waiting for us all.
