# Epistemology of Romance, Part 1

The Notebook is one of the most beloved romance films of the 21st century. When I run this activity, whether it’s at a rationality workshop or Vibecamp, and I ask someone to summarize what it’s about, there’s usually someone who, eyes shining bright, will happily describe what a moving love story it is—all about a man, Noah, who falls in love with a woman named Allie one summer, writes her every day for a year after they're separated, reconnects with her years later, and then in old age reads their story to her in a nursing home because she has dementia, helping her remember their love until they die peacefully in each other's arms.

And none of that is wrong. That is the bulk of what happens in the movie.

But when I follow up by asking them how the relationship *started *(which, in a dozen instances of running this event, only one person has ever independently volunteered)... well, my favorite reaction was back in 2021, when the girl’s face immediately shifted from glowing enthusiasm to a sheepish “OH… right, that was actually quite problematic, wasn’t it?”

“Problematic.” Ah, the British understatement.

[What happens is this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvMebv4-Ko0): Noah sees Allie at a carnival and asks her out. She says no. He asks why not, and she says “because I don’t want to?” Her date, who was nearby the whole time, leads her away.

Noah follows them, sees her on a ferris wheel, and climbs it until he can force himself to sit between them.

As they’re freaking out, he introduces himself and says he’d really like to take her out. The ferris wheel operator stops the ferris wheel and yells at him that the seats are designed for two. He says okay, climbs out of the seat, then *hangs from the bar in front of the seat, *well over 600 feet above the ground, so he can ask her out again.

She says no again.

He asks why not again.

She repeats that she *doesn’t want to.*

So he lets go with one hand, saying she leaves him “no choice.”

More freaking out ensues. Others start yelling at him to stop. He says “not until she says yes,” and starts to visibly struggle to keep his grip with just one hand. Someone yells at her to just say she’ll go out with him, and still clearly freaking out, she says fine, she’ll go out with him.

He then makes her *repeat it multiple times* until she’s yelling she wants to go out with him, and only then does he use both hands again and climb down.

This is not a minor detail. This is the *inciting incident of the entire love story*.

And somehow, in the cultural memory of this film, it’s often just not part of the narrative. When people describe The Notebook as romantic, I don’t think they’re explicitly endorsing that scene—most seem to just kind of forget it's there (though these days you’ll find a lot more people calling it out). The emotional beats that stick are the rain kiss, the letters, the nursing home. Not the part where the relationship began with what would, in any other context, be recognized as stalking, coercion, and emotional blackmail.

I'm not bringing this up to cancel The Notebook or to argue that enjoying it makes you a bad person. I'm bringing it up because it's a vivid example of something important: **the sources we learn about romance from are not optimized for teaching us true things about healthy romances.**

And if that's true of the most popular romance movie of a generation, it's worth asking: what else have we absorbed about romance, dating, and sex?

What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?

Think about where your beliefs about dating and relationships actually came from. For most people, the answer is some combination of:

*   Media
*   Family
*   Religion and culture norms
*   Friends and peers

And it’s worth explicitly noticing that *none of these sources are optimized for truth*.

Each one has its own set of values, incentives, and blind spots that warp what it says or omits about love and sex. And most of us have never really examined which parts of our romantic worldview came from where, or whether those sources should be trusted.

There may be some other area of our lives as important as this that we build on more shaky epistemic foundations, but if there is, I can’t think of it.

**Media**
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This problem applies to varying degrees between books, television, games, and films, but when it comes to romantic tropes, the two most powerful media forces in most young people’s lives are Disney films and Hollywood blockbusters. While the issue has gotten slightly better in some ways over the years, the classics are still common canon for youngsters even outside of Western countries. Aladdin is about a boy who spends most of the film lying to his love interest, Cinderella involves a prince who falls for a woman purely on her (also magically deceptive) beauty and a single dance, and as for Beauty and the Beast… yeah.

As for Hollywood, just about every action movie has a shoehorned romance subplot that involves two people meeting and falling for each other, or a one sided love that becomes reciprocated, in the space of a handful of conversations and scenes. This would be fine if it was portrayed the way it happens in real life, but the framing is almost exclusively triumphant and implying of happily-ever-afters. And situations like The Notebook are alarmingly common when you know what to look for. When’s the last time you watched the original Blade Runner, for example? Remember how that romantic subplot consummated?

The most straightforward reason we can’t trust movies or TV or even novels is that they aren't *trying *to teach you how to score a date, or how to start and maintain a healthy relationship. They're trying to entertain you. They're optimized for emotional catharsis, dramatic tension, and satisfying narrative arcs.

This creates predictable distortions:

**Persistence pays off.** In movies, if someone says no, that often just means "try harder" or "make a grander gesture." The protagonist who doesn't give up gets the love interest in the end. In reality, while there are always some exceptions, most people who won't take no for an answer are at best exhausting, and at worst dangerous.

**Grand gestures work.** Showing up at someone's workplace with flowers, making public declarations of love, flying across the country to stop a wedding—these are dramatic, which makes them entertaining. They're also often boundary violations that put pressure on someone to respond positively in front of others. Even in private they tend to be incredibly stressful and unwanted. I'm not saying they can't ever work in real life, but they usually positively received when there’s already a romantic spark or clear mutual interest.

**Conflict means passion.** Couples who fight constantly are portrayed as having "chemistry." The will-they-won't-they tension, the dramatic breakups and makeups—it all reads as romantic. But relationships built on constant conflict are exhausting to actually live through, and tend to cause people to pretzel themselves or each other just to create some semblance of peace.

**Love at first sight works out.** Instant mutual attraction is presented not just as a normal part of courtship, which for many it is, but as *destiny*. Slow-building connection, developing feelings over time, choosing someone who brings out your best self rather than just excites you sexually—these are less cinematic.

**“Soul Mates” are real.** There's exactly one right person out there for you, and your job is to find them. Not only is this statistically absurd, it creates a conflicting framework where any relationship difficulty is evidence that maybe this isn't your soulmate, rather than a normal part of two humans building something together.

Media has other selection effects. Most writers don't know how to resolve hard problems in a satisfying way, and that includes romantic problems. This means healthy, stable relationships between people who communicate clearly and maturely don't create the easy conflicts the writers need. And since they can't create dramatic tension between two people who talk through their problems, respect each other's boundaries, and build a life together without crisis, the relationships we see on screen are wildly unrepresentative of the relationships worth having.

To be clear, again, none of this is to say that nothing you ever see in films can ever work in real life. Sometimes grand gestures *do *work to start a relationship, even ones that might be considered boundary pushing or risky. Many people’s sexuality *does *include Consensual Non-Consent dynamics.

But especially when we’re young and impressionable, which everyone is at some point, the dynamics in each film, book, and show has outsized impact on our models, far more than most realize.

Oh, and I’d be remiss not to mention the impact of porn on people’s views on sex, young or old, but I expect most people are aware of that particular set of distortions, and it would take a whole other article to go in-depth. Suffice to say, if you want to know what sex is really like, from good to bad to weird, there's not much between sexual superstimuli on one end and hyper-romantic wish fulfillment on the other.

**Family**
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Raise your hand if you ever got dating advice from your parents.

Put your hand down if it mostly concerned how to dress or present yourself.

Put your hand down if it mostly concerned warnings about STDs and pregnancy.

Put your hand down if it mostly concerned what sorts of people you shouldn't date.

Put your hand down if it was generic encouragement like "just be yourself" or "you'll find someone when you're ready."

In my experience running this, people tend to be surprised by how few hands go up in the first place, let alone survive to the end. And of those that do, the advice is rarely about the actual skills involved—how to flirt, how to ask someone out, how to read interest, how to navigate rejection, all that stuff is never even touched on, let alone how to navigate consent beyond “no means no,” or communicate what you want in bed.

Older siblings might be more helpful here, but it really depends a lot on the sibling, and the relationship people have with them. Also, advice that comes across gender lines is often different from advice that’s passed down between boys and girls; the same tends to be true for parents and their kids.

For most, your family wasn’t trying to mislead or sabotage you. But they also weren’t optimizing for truth either, even if you could trust their epistemics. They're optimized for a mix of their own comfort, transmitting their values, and your safety.

The distortions here are different:

**Sample size of one (or zero).** Most people's primary model of "how relationships work" comes from watching their parents. But that's one data point, from a different generation, between two specific people whose dynamic may or may not generalize. If your parents had a bad relationship, you might have learned what to avoid but not what to aim for. If they had a good one, you might assume their specific approach is universal when it might actually just be well-suited to them.

**Shame.** Most parents will never teach their children how to flirt, how to express romantic interest, how to be sexually attractive, or how to navigate the actual mechanics of dating. The most you're likely to get is warnings, with the implicit message that sexuality is dangerous and needs to be contained, not that it's a normal part of life you could get better at with guidance.

This isn't because parents don't want their kids to eventually find love. It's because talking about these things often feels awkward (for both parents and kids!), and because parents often have their own shame and hangups. In many cultures, this sort of thing just isn't conceived of as part of the parent's role. 

But the result of all this is that most people enter adulthood with zero explicit instruction in one of the most important skill sets they'll ever need. Imagine if we treated learning to drive or manage money the same way—just warnings about what not to do, encouragement to believe in yourself, and a "good luck" pat out the door.

**Unexamined assumptions.** The advice you get from family often comes with invisible premises about gender roles, what relationships are for, what counts as success. "Happy wife, happy life" and "men are simple creatures" and "never go to sleep angry” aren't wisdom; they're cached heuristics that shut down curiosity and the complexity of individual experiences.

**Their fears, not yours.** Parents especially tend to give advice oriented around their anxieties. Don't date that kind of person. Don't move too fast. Don't let them pressure you. Any of these *might *be useful wisdom for your circumstances, but are often motivated by projection and protective fear, not a reasoned examination of the particulars of your personality and your partner’s.

**Generational and cultural mismatch.** Dating has changed. The scripts your parents followed—how to meet people, when to commit, what the milestones are—may not apply anymore, especially if you’re a first-generation immigrant. Their advice might be accurate for a completely different world than the one you’re living in.

This is all especially tragic because when it comes to marriage and children, most parents are actually quite invested in your success! But good intentions aren't the same as good information. You can't rely on them to be accurate sources, even when they're genuinely trying to help… and sometimes, their own traumas and hangups will fuel a twisted picture of reality that they then try to pass on to you “for your own good.”

**Religion and Culture**
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If you've ever traveled internationally, or dated someone from a different cultural background, you've probably noticed how different the assumptions can be. Who pays for dates, when you meet each other's families, what physical affection is acceptable in public, or even what counts as “cheating.” It becomes obvious very quickly that what feels like "just how things are done" is actually "how things are done here." And while there may be a *purpose *to any particular norm, that doesn’t make it less arbitrary, or superior to alternatives.

When I ask people where they learned that sex before marriage is bad, or that men should make the first move, or that people can’t be platonic friends with their exes or the opposite gender, they often can't point to a specific conversation. It was just... in the air. Absorbed from church, or relatives, or the way people talked about others who did things differently. The rules were transmitted without ever being explicitly argued for, which makes them pretty hard to question, let alone critically examine.

As with the previous categories, we can easily see again that religious and cultural traditions around romance and sex aren't optimized for your personal happiness, let alone for empirical accuracy. They're optimized for things like social stability, reproduction, community cohesion, and whatever moral frameworks are dominant.

This doesn't mean they're worthless. Traditions that have persisted often contain some embedded wisdom—about the value of commitment, about not making major decisions in the heat of infatuation, or even just to set a coordination standard that works for 90% of people.

But the wisdom is tangled up with everything else, and it's rarely presented as "here's a useful heuristic" rather than "here's how things can work effectively," or worse, “here’s the only moral way to do this.”

Some common distortions here include:

**Rigid gender roles.** Men lead, women follow. Men provide, women nurture. Men pursue, women are pursued. These aren't presented as one possible arrangement that works for many people—they're presented as the natural order, or God's design, or just "how it is." If your actual preferences or strengths don't match the script, you’re the one that’s assumed to be bad or wrong.

**Purity frameworks**. The idea that sexuality outside of marriage is not just inadvisable but corrupting—that it makes you damaged goods, that it's something to be ashamed of, that your "body count" determines your worth as a partner. These frameworks don't just affect behavior, they shape how people feel about themselves and others, even long after they've consciously rejected the overarching beliefs attached to them.

**Marriage as institution over relationship.** In many traditions, marriage isn't primarily about two people's happiness together—it's about economic security, stable child rearing, and preventing social drama. The relationship between the actual spouses is secondary. This can show up as pressure to marry by a certain age, to marry within certain groups, or to stay married regardless of how the relationship is actually going. There's nothing wrong with this if it's what you want, but most people in modern times are primarily seeking a life partner that makes them happy first and foremost.

**Courtship scripts that don't match reality**. Formal courtship, chaperoned dating, arranged introductions—these made sense in contexts where young people had limited ways to meet, where family reputation mattered, and where marriages were partly economic negotiations. If you're living in a time and place with dating apps and geographic mobility and careers that delay marriage by a decade, the old scripts might still work for some people, but won’t for everyone.

The challenge with all of the above is that much of cultural wisdom has real value buried somewhere. It's just hard to extract the useful parts from the rest.

"Commitment is necessary to get through rough patches" can be genuine wisdom. "Commitment means staying no matter what" causes plenty of grievous harm. 

"Don't date just for sex” can be good advice. "Don't have sex until marriage" is disconnected from how most people find romantic fulfillment, and ignores the reality of birth control.

The traditions often don't distinguish between the core insight and the specific implementation, and questioning any part often results in backlash that prevents evolution or nuance.

And unlike the media, where most people understand on some level that movies aren't instruction manuals, religious and cultural teachings often come with the explicit claim that they are the correct way to live. That makes them harder to examine critically, and harder to update when your experience doesn't match what you were taught.

**Friends and Peers**
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Finally, we reach what was, for many people, the most trusted sources of info. Friends can be your most honest source of information about romance… but "most honest" is a relative term, and there are plenty of biases worth noticing.

If you're lucky, you had close, secure friendships that inspired a willingness go br vulnerable and open about their confusions and failures.

But a lot of teenage boys tend to share exaggerated conquest stories implying more experience and smoothness than is plausible. The incentive is to seem like you know what you're doing; admitting confusion or inexperience is low-status, and guys who have even a couple stories to share, even second-hand ones from older brothers or cousins, get a lot of eager ears. The result is a lot of distorted advice that becomes received wisdom, passed around with the confidence of someone who's definitely had loads of sex, trust me.fi

For girls, the dynamics are often more complicated. There can be a tension between "don't be slutty" and "I'm more grown up than you" that creates a weirdly tiered information environment. More experienced girls might drop hints or share selectively with those less knowledgeable than them, but there's an assortative quality to it—girls tend to form close bonds with others at similar experience levels, and information travels through the grapevine in whispers as often as boasts. You might overhear things, or pick up on hints, but you’re still not going to get a full honest picture.

Neither version tells you much about how attraction actually works or what a good relationship looks like. 

**Performance over accuracy.** People describe the relationships they want others to believe they have. The fight that happened last night doesn't always make it into the next day's conversations. The sex that's become routine gets described as "fine." The doubt about whether this is really the right person gets swallowed. There's social pressure to present your relationship as good, your partner as great, your choices as correct... or, in reverse, friendgroups can incentivize endless critique of the group's husbands and wives, whether deserved or not.

None of this is usually intentional deception. Just an incentive landscape that makes vulnerability and nuance risky.

**Selection effects on who shares what.** The friends who talk most about their dating lives aren't a random sample. Sometimes the people with the most to say are the ones with the most drama, which skews your picture of what relationships look like. Meanwhile, the friends with the most embarrassing or uncertain stories, or the ones in stable, happy relationships might rarely mention them at all.

**Validation over truth.** Sometimes what you want from a friend is someone to tell you you're right, and sometimes what a friend wants is to support you, not challenge you. These incentives align toward telling you what you want to hear. "You deserve better" is easier to say than "I think you're being unreasonable." "He sounds like a jerk" requires less courage than "Have you considered that you might be part of the problem?" Friends willing to say the hard thing are rare and precious.

**Limited sample size, confidently generalized.** By the end of highschool, you friend group as a whole has had a handful of relationships in total, if that? And from that tiny sample, they'll generalize freely. "It works every time," "That never works," "When you know, you just know." These generalizations feel authoritative because they're delivered with confidence by people you trust, but they're drawn from a minuscule and non-representative slice of the population.

**The blind leading the blind.** If you're in your twenties trying to figure out dating, your friends are... also mostly in their twenties trying to figure out dating. You're all working from the same limited experience and the same polluted information sources. Pooling your confusion doesn't magically produce clarity. Sometimes it just produces a shared set of misconceptions that feel true because everyone agrees on them.

All that said, honest friends who are willing to share their unfiltered, vulnerable truths can be invaluable in forming more clear romantic models… they're just rare. 

And *you* have to actively cultivate the conditions for that honesty. Make it safe to be vulnerable, reward candor instead of punishing it, and be willing to hear things that go against accepted wisdom.

If you're lucky enough to have older friends, or friends who've been through more, or friends who think differently than others, pay attention to them. They're your best chance at escaping localized echo chamber. But even then, remember: they're still just individuals, with their own filters and biases and limited data sets.

**Now What?**
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If you've made it this far and this is the first time you've considered these things, you might be feeling a bit adrift. I've just argued that the four main sources of information for romance and sex are all unreliable in different ways. Media wants to entertain you. Your family wants to protect you and pass on their values. Religion and society want conformity and predictability. Your friends want you to like and respect them. None of them are optimizing for truth, and information from each comes filtered through a different set of incentives, blind spots, and distortions.

So where does that leave you?

The good news is that there are some decent resources out there, if you know where to look. The Gottman Institute has decades of research on what actually predicts relationship success and failure. Aella has done fascinating survey work on sexual preferences and experiences. Books like *He's Just Not That Into You* and *Models: Attract Women Through Honesty* cut through some of the romantic mythology with practical, grounded advice.

But if you want to be an active participant in your own knowledge, and have the tools to evaluate information others pass along… well, [better general epistemics is a good starting point](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xEPiojzEzQexafcBR/information-hygiene). But navigating the modern territory of romance and sex in particular is complicated enough that it deserves its own article—especially because it necessarily leaves the realm of purely descriptive epistemic analysis, and takes a step toward more normative assertions and personal analysis.

I'm not the first to notice that we're failing, as a society, to provide good answers to these questions. There are researchers from various fields trying to provide answers, some rigorously, and some… less so. There are also communities and influencers trying to create a fifth source of romantic advice, independent from the traditional sources, each with their own biases and incentives.

In Part 2, I'll go deeper on good sources like the Gottmans and Aella, as well as corrosive movements like The Red Pill and influencers like Andrew Tate—what makes them so appealing, and the progressive blind spots that make them more appealing than they should be. And finally, I'll make the case for what I think is the most crucial part of good romantic epistemics overall: learning to have real, honest, vulnerable conversations with actual humans about what they want and experience.

Until then, consider this an invitation to start noticing. When you have a belief about how dating works, or what men want, or what women want, or what a healthy relationship looks like—ask yourself where that belief came from. You might be surprised how often the answer is "a movie I saw when I was fourteen" or "something my mom used to tell me" or "I don't actually know."

That noticing is the first step. Without it, you're more likely to just end up running scripts written by others… hopefully not Hollywood’s.

([Part 2 now available](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LM2GLGQxw6tSyo8sy/epistemology-of-romance-part-2))