A Bite of Bitter Cherry
Valentine’s Day began with a spat - but haven’t artists and writers taught us that true romance needs a tang of bitterness?
Valentine’s Day began with a spat. As I left for the train station we made up with a kiss, lips brushing briefly in the acknowledgment – borne out of decades of marriage - that it will all be fine when I get home. But as I sat on the train, rocking from station to station, there was left that tiny lingering resentment, a splinter I couldn’t stop teasing. A tang of bitterness.
Romance is supposed to be sweet. That’s what we’re told. It should be pink and soft, wrapped in ribbons, dipped in sugar, and tied up with a bow. Valentine’s Day, with its pastel hearts and glittering chocolates, insists that love is something smooth and untroubled, like the icing on a cake.
But the best love stories—the ones that stay with us, that haunt paintings and poetry, that slip into music and dreams—are never just sweet. They have an edge, a bite, a shadow running through them. They taste not like sugar, but like a bitter cherry: dark, lush, and lingering on the tongue long after the moment has passed.
Why We Love a Little Bit of Bitterness
The most compelling stories about love are not the ones where everything is easy. They are the ones that contain friction, longing, even loss.
• Heathcliff howling over Catherine’s grave in Wuthering Heights.
• Dante glimpsing Beatrice across the street, loving her forever but never touching her.
• Orpheus turning back, just before the exit.
There is something intoxicating about the almost—the love that might have been, the one that never quite resolves. Because love, in its most heightened, artistic, world-altering form, is rarely about stability. It is about tension.
Artists, writers, musicians—anyone who has tried to capture romance in creative form—understand this instinctively. A love story that is too neat, too symmetrical, too saccharine, has no weight. It dissolves on the tongue. But add a little darkness, a little resistance, and suddenly, it becomes something potent. A love letter means more when it is written through tears. A song is deeper when it carries an ache. A painting of a lover’s face is richer when you sense the hand that painted it was trembling.
The Feminine Experience of Longing
For women, particularly, romance has long been tangled with power—who has it, who doesn’t, and how it must be navigated. We have been taught, in a thousand different ways, that love is something to be earned. That if a man is cold or distant or cruel, our patience and goodness will thaw him. That a love worth having is one that must be fought for, or suffered through.
It is why the brooding, difficult hero remains irresistible. It is why we are drawn to love that is not freely given, but won. We have been taught to see the challenge as proof of its depth.
But is that truly romance? Or is it a trick we’ve inherited?
The bitter cherry lingers on the tongue. We tell ourselves it is sweet.
Beyond the Fairy Tale
Perhaps real romance—deep, lasting, nourishing love—is not about winning or waiting. Perhaps it is not a test, or a game, or a grand, impossible struggle. Perhaps it is, instead, something that arrives without needing to be wrestled into existence. Something that does not demand endurance or suffering, but simply is.
And yet.
Even knowing this, we still find beauty in the ache. We still return to the songs of longing, the poems of heartbreak, the stories of love that slips through fingers like smoke. Because sometimes, there is poetry in the almost. Sometimes, the bitter note makes the sweetness richer.
So today, on Valentine’s Day, let us not drown in saccharine romance. Let us celebrate love in all its shades: the joy and the sorrow, the sweetness and the bite. A bite of bitter cherry, rolling over the tongue.
Because after all, isn’t that where the poetry lives?