Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc

There’s a script a lot of us have memorized.

It goes something like this:

“I’m fine on my own.” “I don’t need anyone.” “Love is great but I’m not, like, looking for it.”

We say it confidently. We say it to friends, to family, to ourselves at 11pm while watching a romance we claimed we’d only put on for background noise and then cried at anyway.

And here’s the thing — we mostly mean it.

We have built real lives. We have carried hard things. We have learned to be our own soft place to land. That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.

But somewhere underneath the independence and the armor and the “I have my routine and my peace and I’m not about to blow that up” — something still quietly hopes.

And I think it’s time we talked about that.

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The Armor Isn’t the Problem. The Pretending Isn’t Either.

Let’s get one thing straight. There is nothing wrong with protecting yourself.

If you’ve been through a relationship that took more than it gave, or a love that looked great from the outside and felt like slow drowning from the inside — of course you built walls. That’s not fear. That’s wisdom.

And the “I don’t need love” script? It’s not always a lie. Sometimes it’s a necessary affirmation. A way of reminding yourself that your value is not conditional on being chosen.

The problem is not that we protect ourselves.

The problem is when the armor becomes the whole personality. When “I don’t need anyone” hardens from a coping mechanism into an identity. When we start to believe our own press release.

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Here’s What Nobody Says Out Loud

Wanting love is not weakness.

I know that sounds obvious.

It’s not.

We live in a culture that has spent years convincing women that neediness is the worst thing you can be. That wanting partnership is somehow embarrassing. That longing is a character flaw.

So we’ve overcorrected.

We’ve turned independence into a performance. We’ve made “I don’t need a relationship” into a personality trait we’re quietly proud of — even when it’s not entirely true.

And meanwhile, the longing doesn’t go anywhere. It just goes quiet.

It shows up in the romance novels we consume obsessively. In the way we analyze fictional couples more passionately than we’ve allowed ourselves to want anything real. In the strange ache that comes after a conversation with someone interesting, when you find yourself thinking about them more than you’d like to admit.

Desire doesn’t disappear because we stop acknowledging it.

It just starts speaking in code.

If that sounds like you — you are not broken.

You are brave in a way that doesn’t get nearly enough credit.

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What Romance Actually Is (When We Stop Being Cynical About It)

Here’s my unpopular opinion.

Romance is not frivolous.

I write romance. I also have a psychology degree. Those two things are not in conflict, and I’m slightly tired of defending both simultaneously, but here we are.

The longing for romantic love is not a symptom of incompleteness. It is not something therapy fixes away. It is not what’s left when you haven’t done enough inner work.

It is one of the most fundamental human experiences there is.

Attachment theory — Bowlby, Ainsworth, the whole lineage — is built on the understanding that human beings are wired for deep, selective, reciprocal connection. Not because we are weak. But because we are relational creatures.

We are not meant to white-knuckle our way through life entirely alone.

We are meant to find each other.

Romance, at its best, is not about finding someone to complete you. It’s about finding someone to witness you. To know the specific texture of your particular existence and stay anyway.

And if you have ever been seen, really seen, by another person?

You know that it matters.

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The Fear Nobody Admits

Let me be honest about the thing underneath the thing.

A lot of us aren’t scared of not being loved.

We’re scared of being loved — and still losing it.

Being loved and then left is a very specific kind of pain. It tells you that even when you are enough, you are still not guaranteed safety. That love is real and love still ends and there is no logic that protects you.

That’s terrifying…to me, at least.

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So What Do We Do With This?

I’m not going to tell you to download a dating app.

I’m not going to tell you that love is just around the corner if you only believe hard enough, because that is both patronizing and statistically unreliable.

What I will say is this:

Stop performing indifference about something you actually care about.

Not to anyone else. Just to yourself.

You are allowed to want a love story. A real one. Inconvenient and complicated and full of actual feelings. You are allowed to hope for someone who argues about books with you and shows up when it’s hard and makes you laugh on days when nothing else does.

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If This Is Your Kind of Mess

Welcome.

This is exactly the space for you — the woman who has read a thousand romance novels and insists she’s “just a reader,” who says she’s not looking while looking, who is brave and complicated and quietly hopeful under all that armor.

I write fiction for women like us. I write essays for women like us.

Because the longing is real. And it deserves to be taken seriously.

Join the newsletter if you want to read more. Or grab one of the novels. Either way — you don’t have to pretend you don’t care about love here.

We’re all pretending about something else.