When Courtship Had Clothes On
What Reality TV Is Teaching Us About the State of Modern Romance
Netflix / Love on the Spectrum promotional poster
“Should we….kiss?” This is the gentle request from Conner on the Netflix hit Love On The Spectrum, which follows humans on the autism spectrum as they search for love.
His date agrees. And in the rain, in his parents’ yard, they kiss. “My first kiss,” he utters in shock.
“Mine too,” she responds.
The feeling is so foreign, so overwhelming, so beautiful… he can hardly breathe. His hand is trembling as he desperately tries to gain composure. His date, Georgie, folds his fingers down with her palm, and the uncontrollable shaking is stopped.
“It’s okay,” she comforts him.
Last Friday night, I binged the entire season in an evening. In a time of broken attention spans, I was hooked. On the edge of my sofa with the risk of unrequited feelings, yes, but also filled to the brim with overflowing positivity, innocence, and love.
For the last few months, I’ve been writing a lot about courtship and romance; ideas that seem to have been bashed to death in the modern world. I’ve been wondering and exploring why we’ve lost these precious concepts and how might we bring them back.
As I watched this endearing series, I thought, “Oh my God. These special needs humans are teaching us ‘normal’ people how to do it. They are teaching us how to love.”
They are showing us how to embrace the lost art of courtship and letting us see the nourishing results of such a revival.
The “intellectually abled” humans create shows like Naked and Afraid… of Love or Naked Attraction, a show in which participants see naked body parts before they hear someone speak. Before they see if their eyes sparkle when they smile. I told my atheist father about these shows and he was mortified. “No, please, don’t tell me we have reverted to animals, assessing each other on body parts first.”
Yes, we have. And with materialism and an unenchanted world that worships money and instant gratification, this was the logical end-point, in my opinion.
The last month, I’ve written about the importance of knowing thyself before entering into a relationship. Who are you? And why are you here?
Intentions.
“What are your intentions,” was a common question a father might ask a young man dating his daughter. But with sexual liberation it’s been thrown away and, as I heard Freya India explain on the Modern Wisdom podcast, we have told fathers not to protect their daughters and therefore we have no one protecting them.
In Love On The Spectrum, parents of adult children are actively involved in their children’s romantic lives. You can feel their warm presence wanting the best for their precious and vulnerable child. And aren’t we all precious and vulnerable children? Don’t we all run to our parents when someone breaks our heart? Is it so unreasonable that we as a culture normalise the idea of family and community being invested in your well-being, which includes who you give your heart to?
The feminist notion that men and women don’t need help in finding a fit partner is so absurd when I think of it. Parents offering years of their life growing and encouraging the human heart of their child and then told… your opinion is no longer required, thank you!
I’m not talking about helicopter parenting, I’m talking about encouraging a general idea that it’s not at all weird or unreasonable for your family to be a part of the courtship.
“I would like to take your daughter to Universal….” is what Love On The Spectrum participant Tyler tells his new girlfriend’s father after taking him aside.
"I just wanted to ask for y’all’s permission."
He looks a grown man in the eye and asks if it’s okay, implying that the woman he desires to take out deserves protecting. He states where he hopes to take her and then adds why.
“I love her.”
Words matter.
Rituals matter.
Another one of the last scenes of the series is Maddison singing to her boyfriend of two years. She sings a song she wrote herself in front of her family and his family: “Will you be my boyfriend forever?”
Everyone is crying because in many ways love—romantic love, especially at the start—is about more than just two people, and I’m not talking about polyamory!
We now tell ourselves things like, “But my daughter would never listen to me.” Or… "What the hell would my mum know?” And because we say things like this and normalise things like this… this is what we get.
I remember dating a particularly dark person, so dark that my sister took it upon herself to email him, to kindly request that he end things. That’s how bad.
I didn’t listen to her and neither did he. And in part, the reason I didn’t listen was because I was living in a culture that didn’t appreciate family and community interventions. I do believe if I’d grown up in a culture of Christian values, knowing myself, and respecting my family as a part of this romantic union… I would have never been in such a bad romance in the first place.
Another thing that hit me about this series was the innocence.
Yes, these participants are neurodivergent and lack our ego that filters out our true feelings… but we can all work this muscle. We can all encourage innocence, we can make what is now called corny… cool again. Because let’s remember, this cold, calculated, swipe-right bad romance we are living in is not at all historically normal.
Wisdom traditions have long encouraged communal guidance in matters of the heart. In nearly every ancient culture, love wasn’t a private experiment—it was a communal rite. Elders weren’t meddlers, they were shepherds. Of course, when things go too far we get Romeo & Juliet, but that doesn’t mean we do what the modern world has done with all our traditions, which is throw them all in the garbage can and pretend they never happened. As if our ancestors were imbeciles and had only managed to create our existence here by some random accident, not traditions and rituals that moved us to our higher selves. It’s called ancestral snobbery and it’s rife and wrong.
If you’re interested in someone… face their parent. Talk to their sister. Relationships come and go but (in most cases) family doesn’t. It is not old school to seriously listen to their thoughts, it’s sane… and some people would say that’s the problem.
We don’t like the idea of romance being at all rational. And it is true that the irrational aspects of love and romance help us move beyond the rational and calculated which is great (sometimes) but as much as romantic love can illuminate, it can also kill people… literally or spiritually.
It should be handled lightly, gently, with immense innocence.
And speaking of the spiritual, it is this sense of the invisible, the things we can’t see but know deep down to be true, that we must bring back in a world where 1.4 million American women are creators on OnlyFans.
In a world where around 82 million American men use OnlyFans.
In a world where we are selling and consuming our own flesh, and slashing our sacred connections and saying it’s because we don’t need them.
The couples in Love On The Spectrum are not racing toward the bedroom. They’re learning how to hold hands. They are slowing down and processing just how intense it is to let someone else into your orbit.
How magical and also… how satanical sometimes. Intimacy is immense.
And another very, very, very rare thing that we get with this remarkable series is… vulnerability without shame.
There is no, “I can buy myself flowers”, there is no “I don’t need you”, or as Lizzo belts out, “I put the sing in single / Ain’t worried ’bout a ring on my finger.”
These humans are worried about human connection, very worried, even though their diagnosis makes things tricky… they keep searching, they keep trying to understand themselves and others in a hope of being set alive by that spark. In a hope of finding a comforting home in true and profound companionship.
These participants would never dream of asking to see a genital before asking someone how they are.
We don’t need to be neurodivergent to love like this.
We just need to remember what it means to honour the hearts we have and the hearts we hold.
If this piece stirred something in you—made you feel tender, nostalgic, or just quietly hopeful about love—I’d be so grateful if you’d consider supporting my work with a paid subscription.
No pressure at all. If that’s not for you right now, a like, a comment, or sharing this piece with someone who might resonate with it is equally meaningful.
Thank you for reading. Truly. It means a great deal to have your time and attention in a noisy world.
Let’s keep honouring the hearts we hold.
This was Grand, Abigail!!
I’ve said this before here on your notes, but we have lost many steps in how we relate to one another both romantically and platonically, but especially on the romantic side.
We men have lost the art of “making love” to a woman - for the ill-informed this has nothing to do with sex - and capturing her heart, with our sincere and deep adoration, respect, care, concern and love for her.
God teaches lessons in places and with people, we might not always think He would. Thank you for bringing these teachers to our collective attentions.
Also, this audio format was truly appreciated, as it allowed me to listen while I continued to work. You have a good voice for this and should definitely do more.
All the best to you and your family!!
This is beautiful and encompasses so many truths.
It also touches on something else close to my heart as a therapist – how we differentiate between what is ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, or as pioneering child psychiatrist Sami Timimi prefers, the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’. A myth has arisen that there are two tribes, the ‘neurotypical’ and the ‘neurodiverse’. Here, you highlight the cultural filter which we use to assess who sits where. There was a time when the kind of behaviour which we accept as normal today would have been regarded as deeply aberrant.
As the mother of two adult children, I welcome – and hold preciously and with humility – the trust they place in me, with regard to discussing relationships. We raised them, they know what we think, we have always been happy to discuss anything and everything – and then leave them to decide for themselves. This is how it should be – cutting young people adrift in the way that we have, with only their own for counsel, benefits nobody.