Is Romantasy Destroying Our Ability to Find The One?

After spending 500 pages with a man who would cross oceans for the woman he loves, avenge her honor, and recognize the sound of her footsteps in a crowded room, it may be difficult to feel excited about a perfectly pleasant first date. But romantic fiction doesn't only make ordinary men seem disappointing. Sometimes it makes disappointing men seem far more appealing than they actually are. In a story, confusing behavior is romanticized. The distant hero is guarding a wound. His cruelty conceals desire. The separation is necessary because the reunion will be magnificent, and every moment of doubt is accumulating evidence that these two people unequivocally belong together. The happy ending has already been written, so the reader can trust that the suffering is taking her somewhere. But real life offers no such guarantee. A man who sends mixed signals may not be terrified by the intensity of his feelings. He may simply be inconsistent. The relationship that seems tragically mistimed may not be waiting for another season. Yet once a romantic possibility captures the imagination, the ups and downs can begin to seem like part of a larger plot. This is how a woman can develop standards that are simultaneously too high and too low. She can dismiss an attractive, emotionally available man because meeting him didn't feel cinematic, then spend months searching for hidden significance in a connection with someone who has offered her very little. One man must compete with every romance she has ever imagined. The other gets to become one. Stories help establish the emotional patterns we associate with great love. Of course, women who read romance novels, romantasy, fan fiction, or smut understand that fiction is fiction. No one closes a book about an immortal warrior and complains that the finance bro she met for dinner failed to conquer a neighboring realm. The influence is subtler than that. Stories help establish the emotional patterns we associate with great love, which may help explain our obsession with men who yearn . Attraction grows more powerful when it must overcome an obstacle. Separation becomes proof of devotion. Emotional torment suggests that something enormous must be at stake. A couple who likes each other, wants the same things, and moves happily toward commitment may build a wonderful life, but their courtship makes for a very short novel. Fiction requires tension. As a result, the relationships that grip us most intensely on the page are often the ones we would warn a friend against pursuing in person. Steadiness can begin to feel uneventful, while uncertainty feels profound. Nearly two centuries before tortured heroes filled our feeds, Fyodor Dostoevsky built an entire story around a man who confuses the depth of his longing with the depth of a relationship. His 1848 novella White Nights follows an unnamed 26-year-old narrator who has spent so little time participating in life that he has become more intimate with his fantasies than with other people. He calls himself the Dreamer. The story has unexpectedly found a new generation of readers. Over the past few years, White Nights has appeared across #BookTok and Instagram, usually photographed beside coffee cups, heavily annotated, or accompanied by music suited to a doomed love affair. Elsewhere online, a late-night "U up?" text is contrasted with a Dostoevsky character declaring, " I've taken all her soul into my soul ." The appeal is obvious. At a time when romantic interest is so often expressed through casual messages and deliberate ambiguity, Dostoevsky's emotional extravagance feels almost medicinal. In 2024, the Penguin edition of White Nights became the fourth-bestselling work of translated literature within the United Kingdom . Yet the same intensity that makes Dostoevsky irresistible in fragments is precisely what his fiction refuses to treat simply. His characters feel enormously, but feeling enormously doesn't always mean loving wisely. A generation surrounded by romantic content has discovered a writer fascinated by the distance between the two. The Dreamer wanders through St. Petersburg speaking to buildings and inventing relationships in his head. When he meets Nastenka crying beside a canal, she becomes one of the first women he has ever truly known. Over four nights, he listens to her story, helps her contact the man she already loves, and falls hopelessly in love with her himself. His feelings are enormous, although the relationship beneath them is only days old. Dostoevsky does not portray him as ridiculous for wanting love. The Dreamer is lonely, tender, and capable of sincere generosity. His trouble is that he has spent so long rehearsing intimacy in his imagination that a real woman has no time to reveal herself before he gives her a starring role in the future he has been waiting to begin. His heart writes a sweeping romance from a handful of facts. Sometimes a man who fits perfectly inside the fantasy behaves terribly outside it. That temptation didn't disappear with gas lamps and handwritten love letters . Today, a woman can know where a man went to college, what his last girlfriend looked like, which songs he listens to in the car, and what his mother served at Christmas before she's even spent three uninterrupted hours with him. A promising first date can be followed by a full-blown digital investigation. A few messages become clues. A shared favorite food feels like fate. Soon, possibility has acquired a floor plan, an extravagant wedding, and names for their future children. We now have greater access to information about one another than ever before, but scrolling through a carefully curated feed isn't the same as truly knowing someone. Often, it simply gives the imagination fuel. A picture can reveal where he spent the weekend, but not how he treats people when no one's watching. A playlist can reveal his taste, but not how he handles conflict. A stream of surface-level, clever messages can create the sensation of being understood while leaving the harder questions untouched. The less we know, the easier perfection is to preserve. The ambiguity of a situationship leaves every blank space available for interpretation. The explanations practically write themselves: He pulled away because the intensity of the connection scared him. The timing was wrong. Eventually, he will recognize that no one else understands him in quite the same way. Reality closes doors, while fantasy keeps every alternate ending unlocked. This is one reason a relationship that barely began can be surprisingly difficult to grieve. We are not only mourning what happened. We are mourning everything that might have happened in the version untouched by reality. The feeling may be completely sincere, but sincerity does not make every conclusion drawn from it true. Intensity cannot tell us whether affection is mutual, whether two people are compatible, or whether the imagined future was ever on its way. Fantasy can also persuade us to assign the wrong man qualities he has never demonstrated. Unreliability becomes fear of vulnerability. Indifference becomes emotional complexity. Years of back-and-forth become evidence that the connection is simply too powerful to be straightforward. His actual behavior becomes almost beside the point because the imagined explanation is so much more satisfying. This is where romantic standards become confused. Wanting attraction, masculine initiative, emotional depth, loyalty, and passion is not naive, nor is there anything embarrassing about loving stories that magnify desire beyond the proportions of ordinary life. Sexual desire itself is not the problem, either. Within marriage, it can be passionate, thrilling, and deeply bonding, a subject we explore in Evie 's 2026 Sex Issue. Romance allows us to experience longing at its most concentrated and reminds us that love can be transformative, sacrificial, and worth rearranging a life to protect. The question is what our standards are measuring. Are we looking at a man's character and the way he actually treats us, or grading his ability to resemble the person we pictured? Sometimes a man who fits perfectly inside the fantasy behaves terribly outside it. Another may fail to produce an immediate epic while possessing the qualities from which a beautiful relationship could grow. Imagination itself is not the enemy. Love has always involved a way of seeing. We notice tenderness that other people overlook, recognize potential within an unfinished life, and hold a generous view of someone whose faults we know intimately. Research on romantic relationships has even suggested that partners who see one another generously can become more satisfied over time. But loving idealization begins with someone who is known. It sees an imperfect person lovingly. Projection works in the opposite direction, filling empty spaces before knowledge has had the chance to arrive. The first allows affection to soften reality. The second allows imagination to replace it. The imagined beloved is so compelling because he never gets to contradict us. He wants what we want, says and does the right thing, and develops according to the arc we've chosen. Real people arrive with interior lives of their own, preferences we did not assign them, histories we did not write, and limitations that do not exist to serve our story. Knowing another person requires surrendering the fantasy that we are the sole author of the relationship. Thirty-two years after White Nights , Dostoevsky returned to the difference between imagined and lived love in The Brothers Karamazov . Elder Zosima contrasts love experienced in dreams with active love, which requires labor and persistence. He speaks about loving one's neighbor rather than offering romantic advice, but the distinction translates remarkably well. It's easy to imagine ourselves as endlessly patient, loyal, and selfless toward someone who exists only in our minds. But the test begins when love asks something inconvenient or unglamorous of us. Love in fantasy is composed of perfect gestures. Active love remembers to call, tells the truth when evasion would be easier, apologizes sincerely, and continues learning the same person after the thrill of discovery has softened. It's less controllable than fantasy because it depends on two people actively choosing one another without a narrator guaranteeing the ending. The answer is not to become less romantic, but rather to become brave enough to let reality participate. Perhaps fantasy becomes most seductive when real intimacy feels most frightening. An imagined relationship allows us to feel adored without becoming fully visible. We can fantasize about being chosen while avoiding the vulnerability of asking what the other person actually wants. Sometimes what looks like hopeless romanticism is an attempt to protect hope from the possibility of an answer. The Dreamer's story ends painfully, without bitterness. When Nastenka's first love returns and she runs to him, the Dreamer doesn't transform her into a villain to preserve his pride. He blesses her happiness and remains grateful for the brief moment in which he felt less alone. His fantasy failed, but his response contains the beginning of something more mature. He finally allows Nastenka to remain a person rather than forcing her to stay a character in his story. Maybe that's why White Nights still hurts so beautifully. Most of us have been the Dreamer at some point. We've mistaken possibility for promise, decorated silence with meaning, or loved a future more completely than we knew the person who was supposed to inhabit it. The answer is not to become less romantic, but rather to become brave enough to let reality participate. Fantasy feels perfect because we control it. Real love offers something riskier and far more extraordinary: reciprocity. The person in our imagination can never freely choose us, surprise us, forgive us, or remain beside us when staying has a cost. Only a real person can do that. And only when we stop writing his lines for him can we discover whether the story between us is one worth living.