Crazy? Stupid? Love

Not everything has to be so hip it hurts. All-consuming love is sexy, raw and a little bit wild. Why not let it happen, asks Phoebe Walsh

- Andrea Varani

Last week, I met my friend for a catch-up at an Italian restaurant. Between a nearby couple erotically eating foodstuffs from each other’s forks and my friend reading verbatim the WhatsApp thread between her and the guy she’s seeing, I found myself—and not for the first time recently— rolling my eyes at romance.

It’s not just me. It seems like everyone is over love. What was once the defining mission of a young woman’s life is now ranked somewhere in importance between maintaining houseplants and watching old episodes of Sex And The City. If the greatest thing is to love and be loved in return, then why has it found its way to the bottom of our to-do list?

Maybe Tinder has made romance tawdry. We’re all too busy being fabulous to waste time on someone dreary, and everyone knows it’s more important to be happy alone than rely on others, right? Wanting to find love seems, at best, a bit of a long shot and at worst, a bit desperate. But if we press pause on being fiercely brilliant narcissists for an evening and relinquish some control, love might happen. Sure, someone might mess up our Kondo-ed sock drawer, but they might spark a different kind of joy in us.

That’s not to say we should go back to a time when we weren’t anybody until we were Mrs Bored Housewife. It’s imperative that we focus on ourselves as individuals, and that we don’t fall into the trap of believing that nobody in the history of social media has had a relationship as good as ours, with each moment lovingly documented.