Picture the scene: it’s Valentine’s Day, and you’re meeting up with your new squeeze at an Italian restaurant. It’s only been a few months, but you’ve got a good feeling about the relationship; you don’t believe in soulmates, but you might have finally met ‘your person’. They hand you a card, and you peel open the envelope, an irrepressible grin spreading across your face. What might it be? A tasteful Basquiat print from the Tate Modern shop? Vouchers for an upmarket hotel chain? Or simply a heartfelt declaration of their deep respect and affection for you? 

But the butterflies in your stomach turn to lead, and bilious saliva rises in the back of your throat, as you read the terrible words, printed in a bold serif font: “Happy Valentine’s Day, you stupid idiot! And by the way, can you please stop farting all the time!? It’s disgusting.” Obviously, you have no choice. You throw your glass of Malbec in their face and speed off in an Uber. The heart’s desperate hunt continues…

Over the past few weeks, Instagram has been desperately trying to sell me Valentine’s Day products very much like this one, even though A) I’m single and B) I would rather die alone in a micro-apartment than receive a card which reads “I love you even more than a really satisfying poo.” Some of them are boorishly scatological, others present a bleak, stultifying vision of (implicitly) heterosexual relationships centred on streaming Netflix and going to bed early; one depicts a couple ignoring each other, together but utterly alone, their blank faces turned away in bed as they scroll through their phones. These cards offer a chilling, perhaps realistic insight into a world where romantic love offers no salvation from the desperate alienation which engulfs us all. You might counter that it’s not that deep, or even that they are ‘just a bit of fun’. But what if, instead, they represent the slow diminishment of our romantic aspirations, and a broader decline in how love is portrayed in popular culture?

It didn’t help that, at the same time that Instagram was bombarding me with these disgusting cards, I happened to be getting really into 90s R&B, and especially Aaliyah: I wouldn’t normally think to put these texts in dialogue with each other, but the contrast between “Your love is one in a million, it goes on and on and on/ you give me a mighty good feeling, all day long” and “you make my knob throb” felt especially stark. The problem with trying to formulate any grand cultural theory is that you immediately run into dozens of counterexamples. Plenty of 90s R&B is angry, sad or simply aloof (TLC’s “No Scrubs”, arguably the misandrist anthem, was released at the tail end of the decade), while today Olivia Dean, whose songs about love are mostly sweet, earnest and upbeat, is blossoming into a major star.

But broadly speaking, the 90s really did seem to be a more romantic time in music, across multiple genres. Quite a lot of songs by Aaliyah or Brandy, for example, have as their theme, “wow, this heterosexual man I’m dating is amazing!” – a sentiment which would risk being received as corny or even treacherous in the era of Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?, when cynicism about heterosexual relationships is more widespread than ever. Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend, with its sarcastic, ambivalent and exasperated stance towards straight men, feels far more representative of the moment.

Still, while the deterioration of romantic sentiment feels instinctively true to me, I’m not sure the claim withstands much scrutiny. Beyond music, there is strong opposing evidence. After years of decline at the box office, romantic comedies have made a roaring comeback on streaming platforms, with films and series like The Summer I Turned Pretty, Heated Rivalry and Red, White and Royal Blue achieving a rare level of cultural saturation. But it’s worth noting that two of these works are about gay gays and, as with the popularity of MLM fiction more generally, a significant share of the audience are women — maybe fictional straight men are no longer as viable as objects of romantic fantasy, their real-world counterparts too obviously disappointing. However well Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights does at the box office, and despite the early reviews being mixed, the film has undeniably captured the zeitgeist. This suggests there is an appetite for grand, tragic narratives and some good-old-fashioned yearning, but Wuthering Heights is hardly a model for a healthy, loving relationship: Cathy and Heathcliff treat each other terribly. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not a love story – love in reality can be obsessive and self-destructive, too – but the novel’s resurgence today doesn’t contradict a broad sentiment of disillusionment or pessimism. 

It is also true that romance fiction writ large has never been more popular. But many of the books in the genre suggest a retreat from a popular, shared conception of romance into ever more niche micro-genres, catering with razor-sharp, algorithmic precision to ever more specific desires (“she’s a librarian who hates showing skin! He’s a cowboy who’s crazy about her ankles!”) Some of these desires can exist only in the realm of imagination, as seen in the rise of paranormal romance, which only romanticises the experience of dating, specifically, aliens, mythical creatures and Christmas demons.

If we really are lacking aspirational representations of romance, this isn’t what’s causing the crisis in dating, or at least the widespread perception that such a thing exists: the problem is not that we don’t have Aaliyah or D’Angelo (God rest their souls) to romanticise our lives for us, and provide us with the hope necessary to give the apps another spin or trundle out the door for what might be another evening of chemistry-free small talk about a stranger’s job. It’s the other way around: like it always has done, popular culture is responding to existing currents, and lots of people today feel disillusioned. But whether we are single or not, most of us know what it’s like to be gassed on someone new, to be overwhelmed by how beautiful and interesting we find another person. We deserve art that speaks to the joy of that experience, and a more edifying vision of love than finding someone to watch The Traitors with or hand you the loo roll while you’re taking a shit.