I learned about romance the way most of us did: through fairy tales, pop songs and rom-coms. Romance was cheesy. It was being kissed in the rain with the Eiffel Tower glittering in the background and walking along the Ponte Vecchio, holding hands with someone taller than you. It meant karaoke duets with a stranger on New Year’s Eve and candlelit dinners with red wine (always red) and a bill you didn’t pay for. I knew what romance was supposed to look like, yet I had no tangible grasp of how it felt, or if it was something I even wanted. But the whole point of romance is that it is mysterious and unpredictable. So, of course, when it does arrive, real and adult and unannounced, it probably won’t resemble how you’d imagined it. Romance might just be a Tuesday after work and involve pints of Neck Oil and a Lime bike. It might look quite a lot like London.
To an outsider, this city has no time for romance. Everything appears rushed, automated, transactional. Its inhabitants are sleep-deprived and largely selfish. We look for potential partners by swiping on screens and take different dates to the same rooftop bar to drink overpriced picantes before someone ghosts the other. It’s frequently described as a dating “hellscape”. Living here is expensive and exhausting. Real romance takes spontaneity and authenticity and guts – it might even take patience and a bit of emotional leeway. A cynic would say you’re not going to find it here. But that hasn’t always been my experience, nor the experience of a lot of my friends. At least not all of the time.
One of my most romantic memories ever is of an unplanned third date. We met for a drink at a Wetherspoons – out of convenience, after work – and ended up at the club, dancing and drinking and chatting nonsense until the early hours. We called it a night around 6am, giddy and inebriated, the streets empty and lamplit. There’s something weird and special about those hours between the bars closing and everyone waking up, when it’s just you and the city, surreal and silly-feeling. “Push me!” I insisted, clambering into a shopping trolley discarded on the pavement next to the 800-year-old Smithfield Meat Market, one of the last remaining relics of the city’s mercantile past. We raced through the streets of Farringdon like children, spinning and screaming as I gripped the trolley’s metal edges, the wheels skating around the pavement, crashing into walls and bins before eventually toppling over. It felt cinematic.
After five years living here, I’ve learnt that London is very often a romantic city – despite so many insisting the opposite. You’ll see it in the handmade signs scrawled on pizza boxes waved from the sidelines of the Hackney Half Marathon. It’s there in the Fold nightclub smoking area, as someone leans in to light the cig of a crush. You can hear it in the semi-serious arguments over the last wonton under Wong Kei’s harsh white lights in Chinatown. Even the corporate gleam of Canary Wharf at golden hour can be enough to make you (briefly!) think you love a finance man in a gilet. Of course, everything can be romantic if you’re falling in love (Charli xcx and Caroline Polachek’s lyrics still reign true), just like everything sucks when you’re heartbroken. But at least London gives you the material. It can do clichéd romance very well, like Primrose Hill at sunset, but it can also do hungover walks in someone’s borrowed clothes, sunlight glinting off the Regent’s Canal. In the summer months, especially, London feels touched by the Gods.
We tell ourselves stories about cities to make them more liveable. Paris is for love, New York is for friendship, London is for figuring out who you actually are. It’s easy to move here as a young dreamer and to get sucked up, for years to go by and for stress wrinkles to form on your forehead as you overanalyse yet another overly casual WhatsApp message from a Hinge match. We all know how it goes. London in winter is cruel and pitiless. But when the city starts to thaw, the long days unfolding carefully, reassuringly, to vague floral aromas and heated up asphalt, its embrace is exhilarating. It is suddenly a city full of implication. London in summer is still not always kind, exactly, but it is suggestive: of possibility, of risk and maybe delusion. London in summer makes falling in love easy, even when living here is hard.