Bad Romance Transcript

Rhea: I’m a big romantic, but I don’t think I expect it to happen to me. I’m able to read it and look at it objectively. I don’t think it’s real.

 Liz: People go into it not necessarily thinking that it’s real, but there is something in the fantasy that triggers something in the brain, so the result is whether you believe it or not, it does impact your wiring and there’s a couple of people out there—Jonathan Gottschall and Annette Simmons—who both write about this. Fiction tends to impact the brain in a way that non-fiction doesn’t. You tend to read with another part of your brain with your barriers down, and when it reaches the emotions is when it becomes a lot more impactful. What connects us all in our very human existence is story.

Rhea: Not only does it connect us to each other, but it also connects us to our insecurities and to our reality. So you tell yourself a story to explain other peoples’ actions towards you, so everything is a story.

 Liz: We tell our birth stories. We tell is everything is sort of within that package. The reason I became Vivian Winslow was because I was recognizing how damaging some of the stories were becoming. They already were, but it was reaching mass consciousness. First, it was Twilight and then it was 50 Shades. It doesn’t surprise me that it had reached that level of global thing, because we were still cycling through subconsciously as a collective, cycling through the story.

 Rhea: Okay. Explain.

 Liz: We had become aware of a concept or an idea when an issue surfaces, and people become very aware, very upset, it’s because okay, it’s fine. We can finally deal with it as a collective.

Rhea: The first thing in order for us to recognize that it needs changing is to see it for what it is, so it’s kind of like how it works for my own personal journey I guess. every toxic story I told myself, every toxic belief I had needed to be made aware to me so that I could process it and let it go, and know that it wasn’t real.

 Liz: Exactly

 Rhea: So that’s basically as I did on a personal level, society does it on a societal level?

 Liz: Precisely. So you have people circling or cycling through those loops, and they’re doing it individually. The moment that it’s ready for release is when it becomes part of the collective consciousness. So 50 Shades of Greycomes out . . .

 Rhea: Yeah

 Liz: And because I read it on my Kindle, all of a sudden I had all these recommendations. I had downloaded a sample and I couldn’t believe what I read. I thought that’s abuse. I downloaded another sample again, not realizing what they were. They’re just samples on your Kindle. I was like, “oh my God, he’s raping her.” I was like, this isn’t sexy. This isn’t love. This isn’t romance, and that’s just when it clicked. That’s when I started to notice the connections between bad romance and dysfunctional relationships. 

 What was up with all of those stories between Twilight and 50 Shades were people having to process institutionalized misogyny and sexism that they’ve experienced, and abuse time and time again, lifetime after lifetime. People were saying that they found it sexy, or that it fed the fantasy, it meant that they were still locked in that old story. So I decided to become Vivian Winslow and write a different type of romance, because I kind of felt it was time to inject healthier dynamics among the romance tropes that were existing, because obviously 50 Shadeswasn’t the first. Twilight was born out of these old romance tropes that have existed for decades, which was fascinating. It was almost like we were healing every trope through these stories.

 Rhea: Well, you can break it down. I’m going to use 50 Shades as an example. It is every trick in the book . . . in one book. 

 Liz: It is.

 Rhea: He’s got all the money in the world, so he doesn’t have to worry about working.

Liz: And she’s the virgin. We have to come back to the virgin.

 Rhea: It’s actually really important that she’s the virgin, because in fact if you go to the book, that’s what changes his image of her, because he has to have sex with her normally before he can do any of the kinky stuff, and that’s when he falls for her because she’s different, because she’s a virgin. So you’ve got that stereotype in there. Then you’ve got the fact that here’s a man who is very, very damaged and can be fixed by the love of a pure woman. A lot of the stuff he does in the book is emotional abuse. It’s controlling. It’s coercive control.

 Liz: It is, and he’s a narcissist. 

 Rhea: He’s buying companies that she works at and firing the men that hit on her.

Liz: Yes, and stalking as a romantic gesture? No!

 Rhea: Sexualizing the power-control dynamic between the genders.

 Liz: Completely, which a lot of romance does.

 Rhea: Actually, what we’ve learnt and what anyone who has been listening to our podcast has learnt from my journey, from everyone’s story around them is the only way to have a healthy relationship is to have a healthy relationship with yourself first. 

 Liz: Yes 

Rhea: But in all these books, someone is else is healing them or they are just not getting healed at all, so it’s dysfunctional from the start, but somehow they end up with these happy endings.

 Liz: The HEA in romance speak, which is the “Happily Ever After” is one of the most damaging concepts to come out of fairy tales. 

Rhea: So all the things that I personally think are really important in a relationship are just fundamentally missing from these stories. There is no equality, there is no friendship, there is no partnership, there is no genuine emotional connection. If we put it together what you were saying which is people read these stories and regardless that you know them to be real or not, your brain is almost rewiring to believe that it’s possible. Unless you are reading it with disgust every two seconds, that’s how it’s going to be.

 Liz: But rarely are you. 

Rhea: No, because you are into a story and you just want to read it.

Liz: Exactly.

Rhea: We discussed this a lot with the archetypes. Everything is kind of falling away, right? 

Liz: The more conscious we become, the more aware we are that we have lived in a pretty messed up world. Again, we have normalized it but we have normalized it through stories, through our history. It’s really from the beginning of time we’ve always used stories to do that. 

Rhea: Now we look at these kind of books and we go, that’s not how I want to be loved, and that’s surely not how I am going to be loved.  

Liz: Well, that’s not love. It’s some version of it. It’s often a perversion of it, and that’s why I think the word “romance” has to go.

Rhea: Do you think romance in general has to go?

 Liz: Yes. Well, in a nutshell romance has become a formula. It’s gifts, it’s words, it’s prescribed actions. We think that by doing these things, this person is going to know that I feel this way and therefore, I should be hopefully guaranteed this type of response. That’s sort of the equation. I wrote this article called Romance Must Die because I think that it’s really a prescription for misery. If we live with this idea that love is contrived, because that’s what it is. It’s contrived love.

Rhea: I show X that I love them by buying them flowers, rather than, oops I forgot that she’s actually got really bad hay fever. Ah, I should have just turned up on time for a date instead.

 Liz: Exactly. Anything that you do to express your feelings for somebody that is heartfelt, as opposed to coming from the mind, because that to me is what romance is. It’s sort of a dictated set of guidelines in which people who want to court or date or want something from somebody else, that they do and so for me, holding on to romance in a story or romance in action is just further hindering us from real love relationships.

Rhea: And real love relationships, as you said in previous episodes, is about connection and partnership 

Liz: And that comes from the heart. 

Rhea: So it’s not always from the heart, not the mind, and I was like, “what is she saying”? And then I kind of understood it in my own way, which is it’s the difference between nice and kind. As a kid, you’re told ‘be nice’. Be nice to this person. This is what you do to be nice. This is how you are nice, and so you are given these formulas. You are given these prescriptions on what nice is, and then kind is when you feel something and you react to someone from a place of caring, but from your heart in the sense that you . . .

Liz: It’s genuine 

Rhea: Genuine emotion. It’s coming from a place of genuine emotion, rather than almost acting and I think that’s kind of when you say romance coming from the mind and the heart. I could be with a guy and be like, well, society tells me that in order to show him that I care about him, I must cook him dinner. 

Liz: Right. Make myself very available. For women, there’s always that lesson. You need to be very available. 

Rhea: It doesn’t matter that he’s a 5-star Michelin chef, and really I shouldn’t be cooking fucking anything. Actually, if I want to show him that I care, it’s maybe doing the washing up, you know? 

Liz: Right

Rhea: Sometimes just say how you feel. Sometimes we assume that other people know how we feel. A little bit of ‘I really like that you came over tonight and I had a fun time with you’ does a lot more than ‘I bought some flowers.’

Liz: Without judgement. You like romance. I don’t judge you for it. I don’t judge anyone for that. 

 Rhea: No

 Liz: I merely want to hold up a mirror and say, consider why. Consider its impact. If you are unhappy in your marriage or in a relationship, or if you are not in a relationship, what is it that you are deriving from what you’re reading, because we need a new foundation. As long as it’s there, we are still going to be reaching back. It still informs our actions and our expectations.

 Rhea: The old paradigm of dating does not work anymore, and a big part of why the old paradigm of dating doesn’t work anymore, men and women’s roles are different in society. Therefore, romance doesn’t work anymore.

 Liz: It still serves to inform our expectations, whether we realize or not. I think some of it is still unconscious. But I think the way through it is to understand that love is ultimately a choice, that relationship, everything is an expression of who you are and how much you love yourself. It’s all in how you relate to yourself. Love doesn’t control you. One thing about romance is that it somehow takes over, and in these books:“I couldn’t help myself”. It doesn’t work that way. Love does not possess. 

Rhea: Normally, you can’t help yourself when you are tapping into part of your shadow that probably needs to be tended to, separate from someone else.

Liz: Precisely

 Rhea: And actually these romance books are romanticizing this and saying you don’t need to tap into your shadow. 

 Liz: Oh no.

 Rhea: Someone else is going to come along and fix it for you. 

Liz: Or match that shadow, then you guys can be broken together. 

Rhea: Yes 

Liz: And that will make for hot sex.

Rhea: Yeah

Liz: By the way, and whatever connection you have, the hot sex comes, and you won’t be able to help yourself. You are going to be open to however he brings it because you will experience pleasure you never experienced before, because it’s out of your hands. 

Rhea: I was thinking about this today. If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best. I have like an issue with that, because not only everyone just is, so you are at your best, your worst any time, but there’s also room for someone to improve on themselves. So expecting someone to just love you at your worst, they can still love you bit it doesn’t mean you need to stay that way.

 Liz: No, and God knows they don’t have to like you at that point either.

 Rhea: No. That’s my question to you. We said love is choice, sex is choice and there are no rules, but how do we do that?

 Liz: Trusting that we are deserving of love.

Rhea: And love in the way in which we believe love is?

 Liz: Which is unconditional. It’s unconditional acceptance. Because so many of us aren’t there yet, we think that romance will teach me that I am valuable to someone. It’s going to show me because we don’t believe that ourselves. 

 Rhea: So what you’re saying is that the reason why a lot of us get really into reading romance is that it’s kind of a way of seeing how in this book, he did this and I know he cared about her. So if this boy does this for me in reality, I know that he cares about me. So in a way, we’re using romance like an instruction guide on how to love.

 Liz: Absolutely.  

 Rhea: But because the instruction guide itself is whack . . .

 Liz: Precisely

 Rhea: Then we are all learning how to love in a fucked up way, and so we really need to throw out the instruction manual and write a new one. We’re all walking around going, we have an instruction manual on what love is and it’s built on the archetypes of what a man is and what a woman is, and what  sex is and what desire is, so we know that it’s right because in these manuals, there is always a happily ever after. So we follow these books because we all want the happily ever after, and we think we’ve been given the instruction manual/recipe book for love and happily ever after. 

 Liz: Absolutely.

 Rhea: It’s not just doing women a disservice

Liz: Not at all. 

Rhea: It’s almost doing them just as much a disservice

 Liz: There are positioning men in ways in which that’s what’s attractive. He has to be powerful and rich. So what about the normal guy? 

Rhea: And controlling . . .

Liz: And controlling, of course.  

Rhea: He’s allowed to have emotions 

Liz: He has to want me. He has to pick me out of the sea of choices he has 

Rhea: Make it really clear at all times that I am the only one in his line of vision

Liz: Like a stalker, but because he’s going to love me, it’s not the same as stalking, which is so not true. 

Rhea: It’s basically if there’s a happily ever after, which I guess goes back to unrequited love and goes back to all of them . . . 

Liz: Yes 

Rhea: If there is a happily ever after, then it doesn’t really matter what happened before because it was worth it.

Liz: It erases all that. There are myriad personalities out there of men who would make great partners, but aren’t necessarily ever considered, where people may be swiping left, not right because the perception that romance perpetuates of what makes a guy attractive. 

Rhea: Romance has died, and in its wake steps up people who are . . . 

Liz: Open 

Rhea: Open.  

Liz: Honest, vulnerable, who can see themselves fully and therefore recognize the love potential in somebody else 

Rhea: And there’s no weird power dynamics

Liz: But it could be that on the surface it looks very traditional, but it really has to do with how you are connecting and how you are really operating within that partnership. 

Rhea: The men and women looking to perpetuate that unequal power dynamic of domination/subordination, why don’t we try something a bit different? Let’s try partnership. Let’s try two people meeting on equal footing, liking each other the same amount, not one actively chasing the other one more, putting in the same amount of effort, get the same out and as a result, they are the ones that are having hot sex because they are actually listening to each other and that’s real connection, not let me contort myself for you.  

I have tried the romantic route. I have tried the ‘pain gets erased when you get to happily ever after’ – (side note, it never does). I have tried the weird power control dynamics – not good! I’ve been wined and dined and not really felt what I needed to feel for that person. The only connections I’ve really enjoyed with people are the ones where we actually just connected as two human beings, and everything about our interactions were far better because of it. Those are the ones that wouldn’t have happened, had I subscribed to all the rules that romance has fed me throughout my life.

Liz: It’s about finding our own HEA inside of us. What’s going to make us happy ever after, which has nothing to do with somebody else, but again that’s how we choose to live our lives and I subscribe to the sort of ‘happy for now.’ Not going to worry about tomorrow, whatever is down the line.

Rhea: It’s also knowing that your happily ever after might be different to someone else’s, and that that’s okay too, and I think that’s what romance does is it strips away our autonomy and our choice, because we are all meant to like the same things and actually we don’t, and while some people may actually like romance, some people might like something else.