For much of the twentieth century, the stories that shaped our imagination about love were unapologetically romantic. And yet today, a very different language circulates online, with hashtags such as #DatingIsDead and #AntiRomance gaining traction.
Romance, once aspirational and celebrated, is increasingly framed as naïve, inefficient or cringe. And yet the Georgian-era novelist Jane Austen has continued to capture the imaginations of women through stories of courtship, formative human experiences and high emotional stakes. Countless adaptations later, Austen’s novels remain a fixture of popular culture, proving our enduring hunger for love stories rooted in patience, virtue and responsibility.
The golden era of romantic comedies in the 1990s and early 2000s saw cinemas filled with sweeping love stories that portrayed commitment and marriage not merely as desirable, but as worth striving, and sometimes literally fighting, for. Romance was treated as serious, formative and even ennobling. It was a narrative space where people learned how to hope, take chances and grow in resilience.
In recent decades, this cultural landscape has quietly but decisively shifted. Romantic and family-centred dramas have declined in prominence, while genres built on action and individual heroism have surged. The stories we tell, and the ones we stop telling, point to deeper changes in how we understand love, commitment and what it truly means to be human.
Today, romantic comedies themselves have become a contested subject. Some cultural critics have begun to ask an intriguing question: did the decline of the romcom quietly reshape how we learn to love? For years, these films offered an informal form of social education, modelling how people met, miscommunicated, risked rejection, apologised and committed. As they have largely vanished from mainstream cinema, so too has a shared cultural language around romance. It is striking that this decline has coincided with later marriages, lower marriage rates and heightened anxiety around dating itself.
Others push back, arguing that romcoms set unrealistic expectations, promising effortless chemistry, grand gestures and perpetual dopamine highs. When real relationships fail to match the fantasy, disappointment and resignation follow.
This critique is not surprising, given that we live in an age in which being traditionally happy, married, faithful and raising children within a stable family, is no longer widely presented as realistic. Recent data suggests that around 40 to 42 per cent of marriages in the UK end in divorce.
Romance is no longer idealised but is seen as obstructive, something to manage, delay or quietly apologise for. A recent British Vogue think piece, asking whether “having a boyfriend is embarrassing”, did not create this sentiment so much as name it. Attachment is framed not as a sign of love, but as a limitation, something that interrupts momentum, autonomy and self-actualisation. Love, in this understanding, becomes a liability.
And yet beneath the rhetoric, the desire has not disappeared. In private conversations, almost everyone still says the same thing: “I want a family.”
This contradiction sits at the heart of our cultural confusion. Anti-romance culture is not driven primarily by cynicism, but by fear. Many have grown up amid divorce, instability and fractured family life. Love, once framed as a risk worth taking, is now treated as a vulnerability to be managed, or avoided altogether.
Dating advice increasingly mirrors corporate strategies: protect your assets, retain leverage and minimise exposure. Emotional detachment is reframed as maturity, and intimacy is replaced by control.
But human beings are not designed for radical autonomy.
We are, by nature, relational. From birth, we depend on others not only to survive, but to become ourselves. This is why romance should be treated with much more seriousness, because marriage is something otherworldly: a participation in Christ’s own self-giving love for the Church.
Love binds, not as a loss of freedom, but as its fulfilment. To love is to recognise the other as made in the image of God, worthy of reverence rather than consumption.
In a culture suspicious of permanence, this sacramental vision of marriage insists that love is not meant to remain tentative or reversible, but to be given fully, freely, faithfully and forever.
Despite public scepticism, the desire for romance endures. While people may mock commitment online, they almost all quietly long for it in private.
Romance is not dead. It is simply waiting to be believed in again.
And perhaps the most radical thing we can say in this moment is that wanting to love, and to be loved faithfully and for life, is nothing to be embarrassed about desiring at all.
