I feel like I struggle with this in all facets, especially as I love fantasy books and it tends to make me feel more down about my real, mundane life, but I feel like I notice the most impact when it comes to relationships.
This isn’t just my current one, but also great relationships I’ve had in the past that ended amicably. I’m in a great relationship now. He’s loving, caring, attentive, romantic, handsome, hard-working, etc etc. But I feel like every time I read a romance novel (especially one written by a woman), it makes me look at all of my relationships in a new light in my head. No one is freaking perfect and lord knows I’m far from it, but a lot of the male love interests I’ve read about in novels are portrayed to perfection with the perfect amount of emotional intelligence that just no real person has.
I don’t know. I love my current relationship and I’m very serious about it, but I don’t love how romance books always ignites this insanely unachievable hopelessly romantic side of me. Do I just have to stop reading completely lol? Is anyone else like this? What can I do?
Well, those men don’t exist, and you know that. So maybe you wish your partner could bring a little spice into interactions with you? It’s ok to ask for things, if specific things would be nice. Flowers? Massages? Dirty texts during the day? Surprise intimacy in slightly inappropriate situations? Those are just examples, only you know what you should ask for.
Sometimes it’s just a change in perspective. I found myself absolutely obsessed over a fictional man in a romantic webtoons recently (fairly embarrassing, I know) and I had to ponder why. I realized that I liked that he was being protective of his love interest. Then I thought about how my husband has been more protective recently - not in an aggressive way, because we have a newborn at home and he’s in more of a caring role for me and our daughter now. But when I realized, “oh he is still very protective and masculine, just in a new way” it clicked for me and my ever-renewing crush on him got another life.
It’s good that it’s fictional guys that give you an “oooh” feeling of longing for something more. I’d be more worried about your relationship if non-fictional people you actually interact with were inspiring feelings like that in you. If you shared that, I might be like, well it’s ok to look at other people and really reflect “am I in a relationship I’d enthusiastically enter into again tomorrow? Or would I be grateful for the opportunity to move on and try something else?” Because that’s an ok feeling to have. You don’t need to act on it, if you have it. And if you feel you have to act on it, that’s ok too. It’s kind of ridiculous that we judge romantic relationships to be failures unless one of us dies during it.