Valentine’s Day and a Leap Year in the same month! It can be hard to escape the romantic messages and social pressures that surround us at this time of year. Some days it feels like everyone is in love and getting flowers and gifts from their significant other. Or everyone is getting married, receiving a proposal or planning a wedding. Or everyone is buying a house or having a baby. Many films, books and songs promote the idea that happiness and success in life are linked to being in a romantic relationship and progressing through life stages at the same pace as our peers. This idea is sometimes known as the “heteronormative relationship escalator” and it is surprising how powerfully it impacts on our subconscious.
Travelling on the escalator and ticking off those milestones can be a positive experience for some people but it is a concept that is often rooted in idealism and assumes that monogamy and domesticity will work for everyone forever. Hallmark movies and Hollywood Rom-Coms focus heavily on the early stages of romantic relationships and tend to end at the point a couple finally kiss or get married - the archetypal “and they lived happily ever after”. The so-called greatest love stories of all time are often quite problematic when you actually look into them. See Romeo and Juliet for example - their relationship only lasted about 4 days!
Romantic love can be wonderful but it can also be hard to find, hard to hold onto and hard to recover from, if a relationship ends. So what happens if you fall off the escalator – or never got on it in the first place? There are lots of ways to feel happy in life that involve a greater focus on friendship, family, work, hobbies and community. There are also many ways to find satisfying romantic or sexual connections with people that do not necessarily lead to monogamy or marriage. Friends with benefits, polyamory, ethical non-monogamy, hook-ups, dating, flirting and solo sex are all alternative options that people are increasingly choosing to explore. For those who do want to be and stay in a happy monogamous long-term relationship, there is also more information and resources available than ever before on how to work on communication, conflict and intimacy to help with that. I highly recommend Esther Perel’s book ‘Mating in Captivity’ on this subject.
Whatever your circumstances or preferences, if you aren’t happy with where you are in your romantic or sexual life right now then psychosexual and relationship therapy can be a helpful place to talk it out and work through your feelings. Most people are not living in a perfect love story fantasy - if you aren’t either, then you are not alone.