The People Are Starved for Romance

Those of us who worship at the altar of Rachel Weisz had high hopes for Vladimir, Netflix’s new miniseries starring the British actor as a frustrated English professor who becomes giddily unmoored by a sexual fixation on her new colleague Vladimir (played by Leo Woodall). On-screen, Weisz is our preeminent interpreter of erudite but animalistic desire; Woodall is the most reliably lunkish and sleepy-eyed rogue currently acting. Put them together, and it’s fair to expect—at a bare minimum—fireworks.

So why does Vladimir feel so leaden, so performative? Watching it, I felt detached anthropological curiosity at best, and more often was irritated by how insistently the series proffered close-ups (Vladimir’s calves, the folds of his neck, his tacky silver chain) as motifs of desire instead of actual chemistry. Weisz’s unnamed professor is a fiendishly unreliable narrator; she breaks the fourth wall constantly to tell viewers things that are obviously untrue, while hammering us with repetitive glimpses of her fantasies—Vladimir pressing her up against a bookshelf; Vladimir pushing a ripe plum into her mouth—to the point where they feel less erotic than intrusive. Her attraction to Vladimir doesn’t seem based on a real craving for connection. Rather, she’s projecting her anxieties about aging and diminishing status onto a hunk-shaped void.

Vladimir left me cold; so did Wuthering Heights, whose stars rubbed up against each other with all the frisson of smooth-bodied Barbie dolls. (If the most erotic thing in your supposedly scorching-hot movie is the latex wallpaper, something’s off.) Love Story, the FX miniseries about the doomed relationship between Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr., seemed to promise elemental romance (the clue’s right there in the name) between two mythic-grade smoke shows. But apart from an early scene in which Carolyn measures John for a suit, the show seems more compelled by the aesthetics of mid-’90s Manhattan than by the central entanglement. Movies over the past year have been much more interested in cars, grief, societal breakdown, and midlife malaise than in people falling in love—the best will-they-won’t-they storyline of 2025, unfortunately, was not an on-screen romance but the high-stakes flirting between Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson during the Naked Gun promotional run.

TV, of course, offered a few notable exceptions, including a sleeper hit you may have heard of called Heated Rivalry, about two closeted hockey players who hook up, flirt, retreat, pine, stare at their phones in a painfully accurate portrayal of deep limerence, hook up again, and then finally admit that they’re in love. Confronted with the spectacle of two human beings of equal status—no power differentials or wealth/age/swag gaps here—navigating their ungovernable mutual attraction, the viewing public lost its mind. Because, I’d argue, we are absolutely starved for this kind of affirming love story, at least on-screen. In publishing, romance is by far the biggest-selling category of fiction, with some 51 million romance titles sold across 12 months from 2024 to 2025—a year-on-year increase of 24 percent. But in film and television? Love makes barely a ripple. In music, too, the number of hit love songs released each year has dropped sharply since the 1990s; these days, artists seem more compelled to write about sex, money, mental-health struggles, and self-actualization. Curiously, though, four of the five best-performing songs of 2025 were ballads or at least ballad-adjacent: Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’s “Die With a Smile,” Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control,” and Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather.”

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We, the people, still love love. More crucially, though, we crave stories in which people connect intimately and are changed in the process—the kind of works that normalize and defend caring about others as much as or even more than we care about ourselves. Times are hard out in the real world. The AI chatbots are circling. The manosphere is cartoonishly—and lucratively—hate-maxxing. (“This is my dishwasher over there,” the influencer known as HSTikkyTokky says, pointing at his female companion, in the documentarian Louis Theroux’s new Netflix film about the manosphere. “Women are made to be fucked,” the far-right streamer Nick Fuentes said on his internet show last month.) What if the reason so many women are currently crazy about romance as a genre is that they can sense that it’s the one thing humanity can’t thrive without?

Two years ago, the social scientist Alice Evans published a Substack post titled, succinctly, “Romantic Love Is an Under-Rated Driver of Gender Equality.” Her thesis was straightforward: Cultures throughout history that have valued love tend to also care about women, for the fairly simple reason that loving people is usually associated with an investment in their happiness. In patriarchal settings where marriages strengthen familial ties and male power networks, love is discouraged, and many women are oppressed. But when cultures uphold love and intimacy, the status of women rises in tandem. Romantic ideals, Evans noted, are “a latent asset for gender equality” simply because they bolster the number of “loving men who want women to thrive and be happy.”

The state of romantic ideals across contemporary culture, though, is … not great. This year has been billed as the year of the “crush recession,” a heteropessimistic wasteland in which men and women are struggling to find compatible partnerships—and are becoming uninterested in even trying. This is not, by my read, women’s fault: A recent study conducted by Kings College London and Ipsos found that almost a third of Gen Z men believe that women should always obey their husband, an opinion that only 13 percent of male Baby Boomers agree with. “We are witnessing perhaps a great re-negotiation of how both men and women inhabit gender roles in today’s society,” Kelly Beaver of Ipsos said in a statement. Raised on Andrew Tate sound bites and hard-core porn, a substantial proportion of young men are less progressive than their grandparents with regard to gender equality. And their beliefs aren’t serving them or their future prospects: 44 percent of Gen Z men report having had no romantic relationships as teenagers, and the same proportion are unlikely to ever marry. (Tech bosses—who seem to value romantic partnerships for themselves—are trying hard to sell us on AI companions, but the data remain clear: Men who are married are healthier, happier, and longer-lived than their single counterparts.)

Evans isn’t the only person theorizing that romance matters. In an episode of the podcast Armchair Expert last year, the actor and producer Reese Witherspoon offered up her belief that the dwindling number of romantic comedies has deprived two generations of examples of “relationships and romantic dynamics,” the kinds of scripts and cues that show us how to relate to one another. Yes, rom-coms can rely on tropes and formulas and set unrealistic expectations regarding love. But their absence has left a void that’s been filled by much more extreme imagery. In the process, we’ve lost “the possibility of erotic material that celebrates pleasure without harm,” as the law professor Clare McGlynn writes in her upcoming book, Exposed. In 2000, about a third of movies were romantic in nature; by 2024, fewer than 10 percent were. (Sexual content in popular movies also fell by almost 40 percent during roughly the same period, possibly because it was so widely available on the internet in much more explicit forms.)

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With all this in mind, the popularity of Heated Rivalry among women seems much less surprising. Yes, the series is about two athletic men hooking up over the course of a decade, with joyfully abundant sex scenes and minimal plot. But the show is also romantic to its core, emphasizing how Shane and Ilya meet as equals, like and respect each other, have electric chemistry, and eventually discover that loving each other enhances their happiness. The show’s carnal gaze is mirrored, as the critic Wesley Morris wrote, by its “heroic belief in emotional nudity”—the “sex isn’t simply positive. It’s love’s gateway.”

I can count on one hand the number of on-screen couples—from this century so far—that have, at least for me, embodied a similar kind of intensity, the type of mutual fixation you can’t tear your eyes from: Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones on Normal People, Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen in Pride and Prejudice, André Holland and Trevante Rhodes in Moonlight. Materialists wore a rom-com mantle but was too convincing in its analysis of modern cynicism, too sharp in its skewering of what men and women really want from each other. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy valiantly asserted its belief that women over 50 can find happiness and that kindness is an essential quality in a prospective partner; for both ideals, it was banished from movie theaters in the United States and released exclusively on Peacock.

It’s beyond obvious that we need more romance in popular culture—more portrayals of sexual intimacy, love, relationships grounded in mutual care and affection. We won’t find those things on social-media platforms, whose algorithms are programmed to reward extremity: body counts and bank balances, “sprinkle sprinkle” anti-feminist ideology and “cheat codes” for men to dominate life. Older forms of culture will have to pick up the slack. But the rewards—for their creators and industries, and for us—could be substantial. To draw on Evans’s arguments, women need romantic ideals to affirm what’s possible; men need the reminder that women are fully human, worthy of love and respect. This isn’t just a conservative belief; it’s also a progressive one. Romantic love at its best can “serve as a site of resistance,” Maria Wemrell and Evelina Johansson Wilén argued recently in the socialist magazine Jacobin. The stakes for love, in other words, have never been higher.