Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:46:11 -0700WeeblyWed, 25 Mar 2026 15:25:54 GMThttps://www.jacquelineabelson.com/blog/is-romance-still-alive-or-am-i-just-jadedLast month, Bruno Mars released his first solo album in 10 years. It’s called The Romantic, which felt, at the time, like a personal promise -- a contract between the two of us. Bruno and I.

I pre-ordered it. I stayed up until midnight for the download to arrive, popped in my headphones, laid flat on my bed like a woman receiving a blood transfusion, and pressed play.

And then thirty-two minutes later… I felt nothing.

I listened to the whole album again.

Still nothing.

By the third listen, that cold sting of denial began to set in. Surly, I’d accidentally downloaded some other artist’s B-side album?

Because to me, a decade of anticipation couldn’t possibly have led to this?

All this requires some backstory:

I have been a Bruno Mars devotee since my senior year of high school, which is to say that Bruno Mars has been the emotional weather system of my adult life. His first album came out in 2010, but I didn’t sit with it properly until 2012, when I packed up my California existence and enrolled at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

A decision that, at the time, I was deeply unsure about, and expressed by lying face-up on my dorm bed listening to “Talking to the Moon” for three hours while my allergies (which I had not previously possessed) detonated across my entire sinus system.

New England autumns are breathtaking, brutal, and the sole reason I’m single-handedly keeping the makers of Zyrtec in business.

The point is that Bruno got me through it all.

He got me through college, through dating my boyfriend senior year (a man I’ll call J.P., who was from Boston and had the emotional availability of a parking meter), through the breakup with J.P., through the years of post-graduate flailing in Boston, through a layoff, through a pandemic, and finally through a relocation to New York City.

One thing that you should know about me is that I consider a Bruno Mars song (any Bruno Mars song for that matter) as my own personal bat-signal that today is guaranteed to be a good day. You may have something different -- hitting every green light on Sunset, spotting a yellow VW Beetle parked in front of your local Trader Joe’s, or passing a window box where the tulips are actually blooming -- as your own personal version of a cosmic wink. So whenever I go about my day at the hair salon, shopping at a grocery store, or drifting between the lanes on the 101 freeway, and I randomly hear a Bruno Mars’ songs being played, I see it as the universe sending me a good omen. Because how can you not? I am so genuinely delighted by these random occurrences of his music popping up during my day-to-day routine. It’s a little shot of joy, small on its own, but something I can always build upon, brick by brick. Like, “Maybe I will drive the extra twenty minutes to go grab boba tea at my favorite café.” Or, “You know something, I will do that Pilates class later this evening.”

I’m proud to say that a lot of my close friends know about this. I often get DMs from people telling me that they just heard “Runaway Baby” or “Locked Out Of Heaven” on a whim while they were waiting for the dentist, or dissociating in line at the DMV. My friends will text me the moment they find out that Bruno will be touring in their city. I’ve learned over time, that the more you share the things you love the more power you put behind them, and the more you are able to collect back on them. It just helps reinforce that positive connotation; which is why whenever any of my friends hear a Bruno Mars song being played while they’re going on about their day, they think of me!

Bruno Mars is now, among people who know me, synonymous with my name!

I consider this THE highest civilian honor.

The man is also roughly my height. I am five-foot-two, though for years my driver’s license claimed five-three, because I thought the extra inch might matter somehow, somewhere, in some future scenario I couldn’t anticipate.

It didn’t.

What actually matters, as Bruno Mars demonstrates at every available opportunity, is charm; which operates independently of height, and which I also work very hard to cultivate -- mostly through jokes.

Anyway, The Romantic. His first solo studio album since 24K Magic in 2016. The lead single, “I Just Might,” is genuinely groovy -- a piece of velvet soul that sounds, I texted my friends Eden and Barbie in Philly, “Like a Silk Sonic track he forgot to hand in.” Smooth, warm, the aural equivalent of a cashmere blanket. I was optimistic. These 10 years of waiting were gonna pay off.

And yet, the rest of the album sounds like music that was designed to play in a hotel lobby while you’re waiting for your room key. Competent. Polished to a high shine. But completely devoid of the one thing I needed from it -- which was yearning.

Bruno’s whole catalog, at its best, is a manual on yearning. “Talking to the Moon” is about lying awake hoping someone far away can feel that same insurmountable loneliness. “When I Was Your Man” was a reflective and intense deep ache for lost love. And my personal favorite, “Somewhere in Brooklyn” is about a man who spots a beautiful stranger at the train station, loses her to the arriving train, and then spends the entire song combing Greenpoint to Flatbush trying to find her again.

That is a love song.

It is also, not coincidentally, a semi-similar situation I found myself in last June. Except I wasn’t “covered in leather and gold,” not in Brooklyn, and (unfortunately) I was not “twenty-one years old.”

Instead, I was standing at a bus stop on 67th Street holding a handmade poster for my friends’ 10K race that they were running in Central Park.

We’ll call him, Ray. He had a New York accent I found charming and a set of red golf clubs that he was ferrying (as New York men inexplicably do) across the borough on public transit. The bus was late. We talked. He had just moved to the Upper East Side, had lived in the city for a decade, and was originally from Long Island. I had been noticing men like him for months -- Finance-adjacent, Patagonia quarter-zips, Shinola watches, schlepping their golf bags onto the subway rather than just taking a cab, which, given what those watches cost, was a mystery I could never quite solve. The irony of it all.

Still, Ray was cute and polite.

See, Mom? I thought, with some satisfaction. I can meet men in the wild!

My mother has opinions about my romantic life. So does my father, though his are less refined. When I tried explaining to them why I’d deleted the dating apps, my mother said, “If I had those apps in my day, I’d go on a date every single night.” My father said, “If I had the apps, I’d have sex every single night.” Then he paused and said, “Wait, did I say that last part out loud?”

He had.

I don’t use the apps. This is a choice I have made deliberately, on the grounds that after a decade of operation, they have ceased to function as genuine dating platforms and have become something more like casinos -- environments engineered for compulsion rather than outcomes, where the real product isn’t a relationship but the perpetual, shimmering possibility of one. Friends of mine have met their husbands on Hinge. I say, Wonderful! You pulled the slot machine and three cherries came up. For the rest of us, we’re Marge Simpson feeding quarters into the machine, telling ourselves our number will come up if we just keep swiping. But what we’re really buying is not a partner but the feeling that a partner might be just one swipe away.

So the bus was late.

“I really have to run,” I told Ray, checking my watch. The race had just started and my friends were expecting me to meet them at the finish line.

A flicker of genuine disappointment crossed his face -- the look of a man who realized he’d just let the lead actress walk out of the scene. I shook his hand, wished him a hole-in-one at the driving range, and turned on my heel. I’d made it exactly twenty yards toward the park when a shout shattered the Upper East Side quiet: “Hey!”

I spun around. The bus had finally materialized! And there was Ray, half-hanging out the folding doors, waving me back into the narrative. This was, I want to be clear, a genuinely swoon-worthy move. I sprinted down the block and hopped on, and we sat across from each other on an almost empty bus.

“So in the 10 years that you’ve lived here, which neighborhood has been your favorite so far?” I asked him as the bus putted along.

“West Village. The bars in that neighborhood are unreal.” And then, “Do you like going out to bars?”

“I lived in Boston for 6 years. All the places my friends and I used to hang out were bars.”

Those days were the best. A nice ball of warmth enveloped me as I remembered going to the Bell in Hand with my friend Helen on Friday nights. Partying at The Burren in Davis Square with Kira and Kelsey. Doing line-dancing at Loretta’s with Steph in Fenway. Drinking scorpion bowls with Fiona at Hong Kong across the street from Harvard’s campus. Eating our hangover away at Grendel’s Den the next morning with Gen. And, of course, ordering the skillet cookie with Suyin and Helene in the basement of Saloon.

“Well, I can text you a couple of recommendations if you’d like,” Ray said.

I gave him a look. “Is this your way of asking for my number?” I looked directly at him, calling him out. Because it’s a challenge. I wanted him to own it.

He gave me a sheepish look. “Yeah.”

“Smooth.” I said, as I held out my hand to him. He forked over his phone to me and I typed in my number.

“Well, now that’s out of the way,” he said, pocking his phone when I handed it back to him. “When can I see you again?”

I warned him that I had a very busy social calendar -- as one does when they are happily single. I was heading to Philadelphia that Thursday for my friend’s baby shower and that this was good for me but possibly inconvenient for him. He seemed undeterred.

“Listen,” I said. I could feel the jaded side of me coming out. “If you’re actually serious about hanging out, text me. And if not, then don’t. I won’t be offended if you ghost me, we literally just met.”

“Oh no, I definitely plan on texting you.”

“Okay, but I can read a room. So if I don’t hear from you, I’ll get the message.”

“No, I am gonna text you.” He said adamantly. “In fact, I’m gonna text you as soon as you get off this bus.”

“Sure thing, man.” I gave him a wily smile as the bus pulled to a stop. “Best of luck up at the links.”

The doors opened, and I hopped off the bus. I didn’t look back as the bus pulled away.

Forty-five seconds later, my phone buzzed.

“I TOLD you I was gonna text you!”

That was a nice moment. I want to say that plainly. It was the kind of moment Bruno would’ve written a song about, once upon a time.

***

I’ll spare you the extended postmortem of our two dates. Here is what you need to know: Ray drank a lot -- six beers and several shots on our first date, while I nursed two -- and had, by his own admission, “kind of” a dog.

“What do you mean by kind of?” I asked, because I could only picture one interpretation and it involved some kind of surgical situation.

“My ex and I share custody of her.”

The dog’s name was Katie.

This was not a red flag so much as an entire red parade. Because who in their right mind would name their dog, Katie?
But also the notion of the “shared” custody arrangement, the excessive drinking, the dive bars chosen for dates that said less “I’m taking you somewhere fun” and more “I want to be somewhere I can drink a lot cheaply” -- all of it pointed to a man who was not ready to date.

On our second date, I suggested Bar Belly, a perfectly reasonable bar in Lower Manhattan with dollar oysters and ambient warmth. “Wow,” Ray said when we sat down. “This place is fancy. And expensive.” He said this out loud, on a date, to me, a woman he was theoretically trying to impress. I said nothing, which took more effort than I would like to admit.

Later, at Scarr’s Pizza, I pointed out that they had a back room with seating and suggested he go ask about the wait. He began shuffling his feet in a way that I can only describe as pre-verbal anxiety at the prospect of speaking to a restaurant employee on my behalf. I have dated a man like this before. My ex J.P. had this same quality -- an inability to initiate, to advocate, to simply walk up to a host stand and say the words “how long is the wait?” These are not difficult words. I have said them thousands of times. Eventually I pushed past Ray, asked the guy myself (10 minutes), and turned around to find Ray suggesting we just get it to go.

He bought us two slices.

Two slices. At 7 PM. After a date that had involved, to that point, a single can of White Claw.

I want to be fair to Ray. He was not a bad person. He was a man with potential who chose not to deploy it, which I recognize is its own category of disappointment -- not the kind that makes you furious, but the quieter kind, where you think, There was something good here, and you left it on the bus.

I broke things off by text from the Hamptons, as my friend Nikki had instructed me to, because ghosting is bad manners and Ray had, technically, paid for my pizza. He texted back: “Yeah, I wasn’t looking for anything serious anyway. Good luck out there.” Which confirmed everything.

***

Here is the thing about being thirty-three and single in New York in 2026, the infrastructure of modern dating is less a path toward love than an elaborate machine for generating content about how the path toward love no longer exists.

Ever since Mark Zuckerburg sold all of our data, I’ve been bombarded with curated videos of women (who I don’t know) recording themselves and recounting, in real time, their latest dating catastrophes. And I understand the impulse. We’ve all got the material for a good stand-up show.

I once met a guy on Hinge (we’ll call him Mr. Waterworks) who showed up to our date looking like he had been crying earlier (which he had) because he had just found out the day of our date that he had been laid off. And for reasons I cannot explain, he decided the correct response was not to cancel but to show up anyway for our date and pretend everything was fine. Watching him hold it together (poorly) over a beer at Roxy’s Grilled Cheese was one of the more uncomfortable experiences of my adult life. I went home early. I bear him no ill will. But I would have respected a cancellation.

What I find exhausting is not the bad dates themselves; a bad date is just a bad date. It ends, you go home, and you order something delivered as you turn on Netflix. But the way we’ve collectively developed this habit of reclassifying one bad Tinder match as a harbinger of the apocalypse. Apparently, if he doesn’t split the check, it’s not just a red flag -- it’s the fall of Rome!

I had lunch recently with a woman who told me she had developed a question she deployed on every first date to screen for what she called, “mommy issues and attachments.”

“Yeah, how so?”

Then she said smugly, “I always ask them, your mother is stranded in the wilderness, but she’s armed with a compass and a survivalist’s gear. She’s technically fine. I, on the other hand, only possess a single vial of insulin. There is exactly one seat on the rescue chopper when it arrives. Do you save the woman who’s hosting her own Discovery Channel special, or do you save the person who actually needs saving? No ties. No ‘I’ll come back for you.’ Choose your favorite liability.”

I looked at her. Was she being for real?

“And you ask this question to every guy you go on a first date with?”

“Of course.” She said, justifying it to me. “It’s like one of those SAT questions packing in everything he’s ever learned. Utilitarianism. Emotional intelligence. Critical thinking skills. Mommy attachment style. Medical knowledge. Forestry. Survival. Ethics of the like.”

“That’s kinda a heavy duty question to be asking anybody on a first date.” I responded, avoiding all eye contact with her. “I mean yeah sure, maybe if they were auditioning for a season of Survivor. But honestly, if someone were to ask me that kind of question on a first date, I totally would pick my mom.”

I then went back to my soup.

This is the other side of the problem. There’s the man who shows up to your date with an invisible suitcase full of unprocessed feelings about his ex and her dog. And then there’s the woman who shows up having already decided the date will fail and built an obstacle course to guarantee it.

I have friends who approach first dates the way you would approach the final-round of a C-suite interview -- which is a lot of pressure to put on a man who is just trying to figure out whether you want a second drink.

My friend Fiona, on a girls’ trip to Punta Cana, taught me something more useful: A two-question diagnostic that actually works.

The first: “Would you rather have lobster claws for hands or tentacles for legs?”

The second: “What animal do you think you could beat in a fight?”

The lobster claws, Fiona explained, signaled a man who isn’t serious. “He’s thinking about what would be funny, not what would be functional. You need opposable thumbs to operate life in general.”

The animal question flags the men who name bears and wolves. “That’s just bravado dressed up as self-knowledge. No one actually wants to fight a wolf,” Fiona said. “Anyone who says they do is a fucking idiot.”

I told her I could probably take on a pig.

“Pigs are vicious, Jacqueline.”

“Yeah, but I can like kick them really, really hard if I had no other choice.” I told her. “I could really commit to a kick!”

Fiona let my answer go.

From her first two initial questions, I ended up building a list of 27 Fun First Date Questions -- things like:

“How would you rank your own Seven Deadly Sins?”

“If your friends had to resurrect you, what five items would they need?”

Or, “If you had to hide a giraffe from the government, where would you hide it and why?”

To be clear, these questions weren’t constructed to catch anyone out, but because if the date is going to last two hours anyway, you might as well learn something interesting. Ray, for what it’s worth, chose lobster claws. He also said he could fight a coyote.

Fiona’s rubric does not lie.

***

But back to Bruno.

His first album, Doo-Wops & Hooligans, was my homesickness made audible when I arrived at Mount Holyoke in the fall of 2012 -- all California warmth and longing in a place that was cold and unfamiliar and intent on giving me seasonal allergies.

His second album, Unorthodox Jukebox, arrived when I was trying to make friends and would sneak into an empty classroom early just to have a quiet place to listen.

His third album, 24K Magic, landed while I was navigating my life post-college. I needed his music at the time -- more than ever back then as I was in the real world sorting through donations at PBS. When Bruno announced that he was performing at TD Garden, I bought tickets for his show for both J.P. and I. A week before Bruno’s show, J.P. broke up with me. So I went alone in a gold sparkly dress. I made friends with two women behind me who shared their vodka when I told them why I was there by myself.

Bruno Mars fans are, categorically, the best people.

Then came the pandemic, and then came An Evening with Silk Sonic. Bruno and Anderson .Paak making soul music together because they were bored. And nothing hits harder than creativity when you find yourself self-quarantined and alone during a global pandemic. “Leave the Door Open” was the song I needed when I was laid off and trying to believe that some door somewhere would eventually open. It did. I moved to New York.

He has, across more than fifteen years of my life, been the score I didn’t know I was asking for. And now he has given me The Romantic, and I feel like I’ve been handed a beautifully wrapped box that, upon opening, contained a coupon book for one free hug.

The opening ballad, “Risk It All,” is pleasant in the way that hold music is pleasant whenever I call the Pharmacy Department at CVS. And as I mentioned earlier, the third track, “I Just Might,” is genuinely great -- buoyant and alive, the one moment the album seems to have a pulse.

But by the fifth song, I was watching the progress bar on my phone with an emotion I can only describe as mild grief.

The album is technically accomplished in every way: The arrangements are lush, the production is immaculate, Bruno’s voice does things that makes me hope his vocal cords are insured. But none of it lands. It’s music about romance rather than music that feels romantic -- which, I realized, lying there in my apartment on a Saturday night at 3 AM, is essentially the same failure mode as dating Ray.

Going through the motions. Getting the surface right but abandoning the structural interior.

I didn’t need an album that was as jaded as my For You page. I was already well-versed in the cynical theater of modern dating, where romance has been replaced by instant gratification and easy access to porn on the apps. I was tired of being told by strangers on the Internet that “good men” are a myth. Because it isn’t true. I know for a fact that good men exist. I watch my friends’ husbands, men I now think of as my brothers, who are kind, present, and (crucially) capable of yearning. I’ve seen the proof of life; I know the frequency exists.

What I needed right now was Bruno to broadcast on that same frequency. I wanted the energy that he gave when he sang and wrote “Somewhere in Brooklyn” that feeling of being someone worthy of a bus-stop stakeout or a cross-town chase. I already know my own value; I was just looking for a soundtrack that recognized it.

It’s an album that is technically tone-deaf to the trials of those of us “Single Pringles” still out here in the trenches. Bruno gave us a masterclass in style, but in a world where yearning is a dying art, I really fucking needed the substance.

“So what did you think of Bruno’s new album?” My friend Kelsey texted me the very next day after the album had dropped.

“I knew someone was going to ask me this question,” I texted back.

Kelsey is a Swiftie with the same pathological investment in Taylor’s catalog that I have in Bruno’s.

“Too slow?” she asked.

“I just didn’t like it,” I answered glumly.

She sent me a clip of Jack Black on a podcast, describing what he called a “chrono marathon” -- listening to an artist’s entire catalog, in order, from the first album forward. He’d done it with The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. The idea being that you can’t fully understand where an artist is now without understanding how they got there, and that sometimes an album only makes sense in retrospect.

“Maybe it would land differently if I was more in love,” Kelsey wrote me. “Or in a different phase of life.”

I’ve been thinking about that. Bruno is forty. I am thirty-three. His long-term relationship recently ended. Mine ended a decade ago, with J.P..

Perhaps The Romantic is an album for a man who has just come through the far side of love and is trying to rebuild his relationship with it -- slower, more deliberate, less urgent. Perhaps it will mean something to me at forty that it cannot possibly mean to me now, at thirty-three, jaded and single and still half-hoping that someone will hold a bus door open for me and mean it.

I was still sitting with all of this -- the album, the jadedness, the general exhaustion of being a person who keeps trying -- when someone sent me a clip from the Oscars red carpet. Ethan Hawke was there, nominated for Best Actor for Blue Moon, a film about a man consumed by a love that was never going to be returned. Amelia Dimoldenberg, in her infinite wisdom, pivoted from asking about his tuxedo to asking him what advice he had for people experiencing unrequited love.

This is why she is our greatest living interviewer.

Hawke leaned into the microphone and said, with absolute calm: “The one who’s in love always wins. It doesn’t matter if you get your heart broken. You’re living when you’re feeling, you’re alive.” And then: “The sun doesn’t care whether the grass appreciates its rays, right? It just keeps on shining. That’s you.”

The clip has been viewed millions of times. Someone on TikTok said it “fixed something in me.” I watched it three times in a row on my phone and felt something loosen, slightly, in my chest.

Because here is what I had been getting wrong about the whole jaded question. I had been measuring love like a transaction -- input versus output, effort versus return, dates attempted versus relationships achieved -- and tallying my losses.

Mr. Waterworks: Loss.

Ray, with his two slices of pizza and his co-parented dog and his lobster-claw ambitions: Loss.

The apps: Total loss.

Bruno’s new album: A loss I hadn’t even seen coming.

But Ethan Hawke, standing on a red carpet in a tuxedo had just told me that’s not what love is. Love is not a bet you place and either win or lose. Love is the act of feeling itself. The sun does not invoice the grass. The sun just shines. The fact that you are capable of caring about something -- an album, a stranger at a bus stop, the idea that somewhere in Brooklyn a man is still looking for you -- is not evidence of your gullibility. It is evidence that you are alive.

And I thought about “Somewhere in Brooklyn.” The man in that song hops from Greenpoint to Flatbush, checking every corner shop, looking for a woman he met for thirty seconds at a train station. He never finds her, as far as we know -- the song ends before he does. But Bruno never wrote it as a tragedy. He wrote it as proof that wanting something that much, that specifically, that completely, is its own kind of victory.

Maybe Bruno’s new album is not the album I needed. That’s fine. He made it anyway -- slow and polished and sincere -- and maybe it’s out in the world keeping someone warm somewhere. And the fact that I showed up at midnight to receive it, hopeful, pre-ordered, headphones in, says something about me that I should probably stop treating as a character flaw.

I know that the thing I am waiting for is real and attainable and not a myth manufactured by songwriters and algorithms. It is out there. The sun is shining on it right now, whether anyone is paying attention or not.

Maybe that’s what Bruno was trying to tell me, and I was too busy being jaded to hear it.

Or maybe he just made a so-so album. We’re allowed to admit that. Even about our favorites.
​
I’ll give it another listen when I’m forty. The sun will still be shining. I’ll probably still be here.]]>