For some time in my early childhood my dad was stationed in West Point. I remember its outlines fuzzily: the houses on the military base all replicas of each other, the lone tulip outside our window, strawberries in the yard. I had an aunt studying at NYU at the time, so occasionally we’d drive to New York City to visit her, and she’d treat me to my favorite clam chowder. In the winter, I experienced my first snowfall, my dad obediently trailing after my light-up boots as I demanded we start the sled again and again, spluttering and spitting and wiping my face every time the snow flew up over the edge and into my mouth. I ended the night cold and wet but still enamored; on the way home, I caught a single snowflake in a contact lens case to show to my mom, not yet understanding it would melt.
Every time winter and its cluster of holidays come around, I start thinking about routine and ritual. It’s not that everyone celebrates Thanksgiving and Christmas or does so in the same way. But there’s something inescapable about their iconography; even as you make these traditions your own, you’re aware of the popular canon of them, the checkboxes you may or may not tick off, the shape of the container you’re supposed to fill. Time to carve that ham or dress that turkey. Time to get out the shovel and the tire chains and worry about slipping on ice, if you live somewhere cold. Time to put up the tree and shop for presents and write well-wishing cards to acquaintances you speak to once a year. For me, time to subject myself to holiday romcom brainrot.
Enjoying romcoms requires a certain mindset. I approach them like comfort food: I watch them knowing that they will generally make me feel good, and sometimes I binge too many and then feel cloyingly sick, but I don’t really set out to be surprised. Entertained and delighted, sure. But I’m not looking to have my foundations upended. Holiday romcoms tend to be particularly tropey—usually they involve a homecoming, there are nosey or wise family members, sparkling lights, snow—and I think it’s because this time of year, more than most, is great at presenting a vision of what it’s supposed to look like, and that affects its love stories, too. And while there are only so many mistletoe shenanigans or caroling meet-cutes I can watch without groaning, I also kind of like their formulaicness. For all the things that can be said about love—that it’s scary or transformative or silly or overrated—the best part of it might be that it grants us permission to be predictable and boring.
I am thinking of Chen Chen’s “Song of the Anti-Sisyphus,” where he writes to a lover about passion’s expiration date, and the entire poem becomes a refusal to believe that repetition is a death sentence. Instead, the same thing over and over can be the locus of romance. Or this fragment from Aleda Shirley (I say fragment because despite my best Googling efforts I cannot track down the entirety of this poem. The collection it belongs to is out of print or shelved in libraries which I do not have access to, but it doesn’t even matter to me anymore because the few lines I know are striking on their own): “What I mean is—when I see your face in the dusk I understand the desire of the rain. Each time you happen to me all over again.”
The thing that has always frightened me about intimacy is the part where I stop happening to someone else. Meaning: I run out of fresh and exciting things to say, and the other person finds me fundamentally inane, and they leave. For as much as I love watching romance unfold, I kind of hate courtship, or at least the brand of it that existed on dating apps pre-quarantine. During dates I always felt a bit like a videogame character: rack up enough points being charming to unlock the next level, i.e. another date, on and on until the “what are we?” / “Are you seeing anyone else?” flag drops. Structurally there is nothing wrong with this approach. It makes sense to progressively get to know a person. But I couldn’t ever shake my feeling of performing. This sounds counterintuitive when I type it out, but I didn’t want to feel like I was trying to make someone fall for me. I did not want to muster deep thoughts about the universe every time we met. I wanted to exist in the same room and not feel compelled to fill it with conversation. I wanted to be bored—and, in turn, given the reprieve of being boring.
I’ve seen this in my friendships, too, in that those closest to me have remarked, “You’re a lot quieter than when I first got to know you.” It is true that I became more extroverted in college; it is equally true that once the fervor of striking up a new bond fades, my litmus test of genuine companionship is that old cliche of comfortable silence. That’s been particularly prominent in my family these days; my sister is back from school, so the four of us are united under one roof again for the first time in quite a while. These are people who have heard all my stories. I feel no pressure to entertain them. We leave each other to our own spheres and reconvene when necessary. Sometimes I walk into Julia’s room and drape myself over her like the world’s most obnoxious cat before leaving, all without uttering a word.
It’s not that I think we’re ever fully known to each other. Most of communication is a struggle toward understanding while accepting that parts of us will remain unplumbable. But what Tolstoy said about all happy families resembling each other is true in the sense that a certain kind of love acknowledges its banality. It strips us of our pretenses and accepts that we are all silly little people living our silly little lives. Day after day, that can seem redundant. But the point is that I wouldn’t want this redundancy with anyone else.
At dinner my dad starts setting up a joke that we’ve already heard him try on my mom. My sister and I make eye contact across the table.
We laugh like it’s the first time.