Where Did All the Romantics Go?

In our pursuit of the raw, the real and the effortlessly imperfect, have we forgotten the magic of making ordinary life feel extraordinary?

There was a time when films understood something we seem to have forgotten: life does not have to be extraordinary to feel extraordinary.

Think back to the romantic films of the 1980s and 1990s. The streets were rainier. Bedrooms were warmer. Dinner tables glowed. People dressed for occasions that no longer seemed to require an occasion. A woman could make coffee in an oversized shirt and somehow look like she was starring in the most important scene of her life. A man could drive through the night with a cassette playing, thinking about someone he loved, and the moment was allowed to be a moment.

It was romanticisation, certainly. But perhaps that was the point.

We have become remarkably suspicious of anything that feels too beautiful.

Somewhere along the way, authenticity acquired a particular visual language: fluorescent lighting, handheld cameras, unmade beds, dirty glasses, natural skin, awkward pauses, badly lit restaurants, food photographed exactly as it arrives, and interiors that look as though nobody has been allowed to touch them for the sake of aesthetics. Even luxury has become determined to look as though it isn’t trying.

Everyone loves their omakase. And, frankly, so do I.

But there is something slightly amusing about our collective obsession with making everything look unmediated. We have become so committed to the idea of the “raw” that we sometimes forget that human beings have always edited reality.

We arrange flowers before guests arrive. We put on perfume before dinner. We choose the flattering photograph. We light candles. We save the good plates. We tell stories in a way that makes them better. We remember summer evenings as warmer, old houses as grander and first loves as more cinematic than they probably were.

This isn’t dishonesty.

It is memory.

The cinema of wanting

The films of the eighties and nineties were particularly good at giving ordinary life a little halo.

Romance didn’t necessarily depend upon enormous gestures. It could be a glance across a room. A walk home. A song on the radio. Someone waiting outside. A train journey. A letter. The familiar ritual of getting ready to go somewhere.

The camera knew when to linger.

That lingering matters.

Modern visual culture often seems terrified of sincerity. Everything must either be ironic or aggressively real. We have inherited a suspicion of sentimentality, as though enjoying something beautiful without making fun of it is somehow embarrassing.

But sentimentality and sincerity aren’t necessarily weaknesses. They can be forms of attention.

To romanticise something is, at its best, to say: this matters to me.

A childhood kitchen can become a palace in memory. A cheap bottle of wine can become “that bottle we drank in Paris.” A rainy Tuesday can become the night everyone stayed up talking until two in the morning.

The ingredients were never particularly impressive.

The meaning was.

Have we pushed “raw” too far?

There is something wonderful about rejecting perfection. The obsession with polished imagery can become exhausting, particularly when social media turns everyone’s life into an advertising campaign.

But the pendulum has swung.

We now sometimes treat effortlessness as a higher form of taste. The perfectly imperfect dinner. The deliberately crumpled linen. The restaurant that looks like an abandoned warehouse but serves astonishingly expensive vegetables. The photograph that appears to have been taken accidentally after several hours of careful consideration.

There is an irony in all of this: rawness has become an aesthetic too.

We haven’t escaped curation. We’ve simply changed what we curate.

And perhaps that is why a little romanticisation feels refreshing.

Not the kind that requires pretending everything is wonderful. Not the kind that airbrushes grief, poverty, loneliness or the difficult parts of life. There is enormous value in art that lets things be ugly when they are ugly.

But must everything be ugly to prove that it is real?

I don’t think so.

A life can be authentic and still be beautiful.

You can eat the imperfect meal and still light the candle.

You can leave the apartment slightly messy and still put flowers on the table.

You can wear no makeup and still choose the lipstick you love.

You can go to the little neighbourhood restaurant and still dress as though the evening deserves remembering.

A fairy dust approach

Perhaps what we need isn’t a return to fantasy, but a return to enchantment.

Just a little fairy dust.

Not enough to obscure reality. Just enough to make us notice it.

The sunset does not need a filter, but perhaps you could stop walking and look at it.

Your birthday dinner doesn’t need to look like a magazine spread, but perhaps you could set the table beautifully.

The holiday doesn’t need to become a cinematic montage, but perhaps you could buy the ridiculous postcard, take the photograph, keep the ticket stub.

Romanticisation can be a practice of marking time.

This is what the older films understood. They gave ordinary experiences a visual vocabulary because they understood that we don’t remember life as a list of facts. We remember atmosphere.

The smell of someone’s perfume.

The song playing in the car.

The colour of the curtains.

The restaurant where you sat for four hours.

The dress you wore.

The rain against the window.

The person who was beside you.

These details become the private cinema of our lives.

And perhaps that is the most convincing argument for romanticising things: eventually, we will all become storytellers of our own past.

Years from now, nobody will remember whether the restaurant had an objectively impressive interior. They will remember that it was where you met your best friend after ten years apart.

Nobody will remember whether the flowers were expensive. They will remember that someone brought them home on an ordinary Wednesday.

Nobody will care whether the photograph was perfectly composed.

You’ll care that everyone you loved was in it.

We are allowed to make life feel special

There is a strange pressure today to experience things without appearing to experience them too intensely.

The cool person is detached. The tasteful person is understated. The discerning person pretends not to care.

But caring is rather beautiful.

So is anticipation.

So is dressing up.

So is making an occasion out of nothing.

Maybe the answer isn’t to reject the raw-cut aesthetic, but to stop treating it as the only honest one.

Reality can be grainy and glamorous. Chaotic and poetic. Imperfect and deeply beautiful.

We don’t have to choose between authenticity and romance.

We can have both.

Because life is already happening to us. We might as well occasionally put some fairy dust on it.

Not to make it false.

To make sure we remember how it felt.