Love should be boring. In every rom-com movie I’ve seen, the relationships are always full of drama. Now and then I’ll enjoy a rom-com or two, but I never desire the love I see on the big screens.
All over my TikTok feed, the lyrics “he is stable, you are deep” from “Pushing It Down and Praying” by Lizzy McAlpine has been the sound over numerous edits of love triangles. Unfortunately, I’ve always been on the unpopular side of love interests and never see it come to fruition. Why? Because I choose stable over deep.
Deep love means intense emotional connection, passion, excitement, and vulnerability. On the other hand, stable love is built on the idea of security, consistency, trust, and reliability. You can find deep in stable, but you can’t find stable in deep.
At least, I won’t be staying long enough to find stable in deep.
Authors and filmmakers don’t do deep right most of the time anyways. The concept of “deep love” in the media is drama-filled and lacks a strong foundation in order to keep viewers or readers hooked.
Movies portray deep love as exciting, but I don’t want to constantly be on the edge of my seat or walking on eggshells around my partner, doubting the love they feel for me because I deserve better than that.
A prime example is The Summer I Turned Pretty. Don’t get me wrong, I was team Conrad, but he was emotionally unavailable to Belly the first two seasons. Because of that, he pushed her away often even though he loved her and made Belly doubt the love Conrad felt for her.
Everyone deserves better than that. To me, a long-term relationship is a balance of both stable and deep, but relationships require stability first.
I do get the appeal of deep, but it can get tiring without reliability. Yes, love is a choice. Love is learning about the flaws of the person you want to spend your life with and choosing them despite their imperfections. However, choosing your partner requires trust that your partner will choose you too in order for the relationship to be sustainable; you can only do so much pushing for consistency before you get pushed away.
This dynamic is illustrated in The Summer I Turned Pretty during an iconic beach scene in Season Two. “If I had known that you cared that much about me and about us. If I had known, then I would’ve fought for you,” Belly says. Unfortunately, by the time she realizes, Conrad has already pushed too much, and the connection slipped away.
Besides, what’s so wrong with boring? I think some people are scared of the mundaneness that comes with love; people often mistake stability for a lack of passion. But maturing is realizing that consistency and reliability are important traits to have in a relationship. Despite the conditioning of the media to find deep, there’s nothing wrong with finding a best friend in life that will make you feel safe and secure.
That’s when you can make space for the intense emotional connection and vulnerability, the deep. Despite the volatile fireworks love can resemble, stability is the quiet understanding that it will find its way back to peace.
No one makes movies about buying groceries together or calling on FaceTime doing nothing or falling asleep quietly next to each other after a long day because those things don’t have an exciting plot. To put it bluntly, it’s boring; they’re filler episodes.
As much as our English teachers try to drill plot diagrams in our mind, life doesn’t always have a climax. Sometimes it’s all about resolution and trying to live day by day peacefully.
Those small boring things in a relationship—like making breakfast or doing laundry or staying by each other on mornings that begin with silence—are the relationship.
Love is finding someone to live through those filler episodes with you, so choose stable over deep.
