The fine line between being a hopeless romantic and realistic

I once had a guy tell me, “Wow, you really are a hopeless romantic.” 

And I always knew I was, but thought, “Isn’t everyone?” I mean Hollywood didn’t make bank from the likes of When Harry Met Sally to Failure to Launch for nothing. Plus, rom-coms have been record-breaking box office hits well before the genre was ever coined.

Of course, I knew everyone wasn’t a hopeless romantic. I may have been on the deep end of it, but I knew I wasn’t the only one swimming out there and searching. 

I took the comment as a bit of a knock, as the words were followed by a roll of the eyes and a slight “pshh” sounds as if someone has already written you off in their mind before stating it. (Well, actually it was a comment someone made on a blog, but somehow I still remember it audibly.) Mind you this was after I turned down his offer to take me out. So I knew the comment didn’t carry much weight. Or did it?

It made me read back over my hopeful account worried that I may be viewed by others as some type of starry-eyed young woman whose feet were unhinged from the earth and wore her heart on her sleeve. 

I was in my late twenties, at the time, bubbling over with hopes in all things careers, love, and life-related. And I had already been knocked down a good bit by enough crazy life moves, relationship situations, and jobs that my hopeful romantic outlook on life didn’t add up. But, I must have spilled over sentiments out of anticipation that something beautiful was on its way, even though it wouldn’t arrive for another near-decade when I was enraptured with the idea. (Well, technically it had arrived but… yeah, it’s a long story.) Due to concern that I may come across as hopeful in romance, I’m pretty sure it was the last post I wrote about love for some time until I returned with the topic of “Good Girls Need Cold Showers Too.” Which isn’t really about love so much. But yeah, waiting can wear on you.

Suddenly I was very wary of exposing any of my heart’s hopes in nearly anything. I didn’t want to come across as delicate. I didn’t want to be seen as naive, or God-forbid, a hopeless romantic. “What guy wants that burden?” I began to think. (In truth actually, no guy fully wants to carry that, but we are very whimsical and cute for thinking they do.)

Something does shift in you over time. Maybe it’s comments or worries like these that get us all a little fearful of being wistfully hopeful or revealing any excitement about what could be. 

Of course, life has a way of naturally stripping us of many of our starry-eyed tendencies. It has a way of dimming out the sparkle in our eyes. There is a wantingness that you get tired of, and one too many miserable dates can make you sick of wanting and cynical of anticipating anything good. 

At some point, you almost feel like you don’t have the right to be whimsical or optimistic in love. You give up being a hopeful romantic, let alone a hopeless one. That or too many bad Bumble dates, misleading texts, or disconcerting set-ups can be enough to knock the wind out of you and create some barrier that you define as resilience, which is actually a reluctance to be confident of anything in the future. Because who likes hoping for something that may never happen?

At this point in the twenty-first century, being a man-hating cynic is expected of single young women. So we tend to just give the people what they want. 

There is a fine line between being sensible and hopeful. When there are endless possibilities in awaiting love and simultaneously seemingly absolutely no potential whatsoever, it can all be a little tricky to steer.

So be sensible, sure. 

But for anyone who is looking for love, the expectation is always far from sensible. So I’m not sure why we always feel the need to hide it.