I Tried to Romanticise My Life for a Week. Here’s What Actually Happened

You’ve seen it on your feed. Women gazing pensively out rainy windows with a coffee cup cradled in both hands, soft piano music presumably playing in the background, a single tear threatening to fall — not because anything is wrong, but because they are feeling things deeply and living their most cinematic life.
The “romanticise your life” trend has been everywhere lately, and the premise is genuinely lovely: stop sleepwalking through your days and start treating the ordinary as extraordinary. Find the poetry in the mundane. Be the main character.
I was in. Completely, wholeheartedly in.
What followed was one of the most absurd weeks of my life — and I say that as someone who once got her cardigan caught in a supermarket trolley and was dragged three aisles before anyone noticed.
Monday: The Dishes
The romanticise-your-life guides are very big on doing the dishes. Apparently, if you approach the sink with the right energy, washing up becomes a meditative act of self-care rather than the thankless daily punishment it actually is.
I lit a candle. I put on French café music. I gazed softly at the sudsy water and tried to feel like Audrey Tautou in Amélie.
What I actually felt was that I’d forgotten to soak the pasta pot and that the music — which had seemed very romantic in theory — was now making me want a croissant I didn’t have.
I blew out the candle after eleven minutes because I was convinced I could smell something burning, and it turned out I’d just overcooked the pasta in the first place.
Très magnifique.
Tuesday: The Morning Walk
The romanticised morning walk is, according to every lifestyle account I follow, a transformative experience. You go slowly. You notice things. You are a woman with an inner world so rich and complex it could fill three volumes of literary fiction.
I put on my nice coat — the one I save for actual occasions — and headed out at 7am.
It was cold. A council truck was doing something very loud to the road. My neighbour’s dog, who has never once been friendly to me, barked continuously from the moment I left my gate until I rounded the corner.
But here is where the magic happened: I looked up, and the morning light was genuinely beautiful. Golden and still, cutting through the gum trees at the end of the street. I stopped. I breathed. I had one (1) cinematic moment.
Then I stepped in something the neighbour’s dog had left on the footpath, and the scene was over.
Wednesday: Grocery Shopping
Apparently, the French don’t “do a big shop.” They drift through markets daily, selecting produce with the unhurried intention of women who have nowhere to be and a beret to wear while doing it.
I tried this at my local supermarket.
I picked up a lemon and held it thoughtfully, as if choosing it were a decision of some weight.
A teenager on a forklift asked me to move.
I bought the lemon. I also panic-bought three bags of chips because they were on special and I am, at my core, a practical woman.
Thursday: Taking Out the Bins
This is where I committed fully and things went sideways.
I had read that romanticising your life means finding dignity in every task. No act is too small. So I wheeled the bins out with intention. Slowly. Purposefully. I was a woman in a French film about the quiet heroism of domestic life. The director would linger on my face here, seeing everything I do not say.
My husband watched this from the kitchen window.
“Why are you walking like that?” he called out.
“I’m being present,” I said.
There was a long pause.
“The yellow lid one goes out too,” he said, and went back to his coffee.
Friday: The Bubble Bath
Now this is where romanticising your life actually delivers. Candles, bath salts, a glass of something sparkling, the kind of bath that takes twenty minutes to run and makes you feel like you deserve to be in a perfume advertisement.
I lowered myself in with great ceremony.
It was, I will admit, genuinely wonderful for about four minutes.
Then my phone buzzed on the edge of the bath and I grabbed it too quickly and nearly dropped it in the water, and my heart rate went from “serene French heroine” to “woman who cannot afford a new phone” in approximately 0.3 seconds.
But I recovered. I put the phone on the floor. I lay back. I stared at the ceiling and thought gentle, unhurried thoughts.
Reader, I fell asleep for eleven minutes and woke up in lukewarm water wondering what year it was.
Cinematic.
What I Actually Learned
Here’s the thing I didn’t expect: in between the burnt candles and the bin commentary and the forklift teenager, something did shift slightly.
Not in the dramatic, soft-focus way the trend promises. But the morning light really was beautiful on Tuesday. The lemon really did smell extraordinary when I used it on Friday night’s dinner. The bubble bath, soggy phone moment and all, was the most deliberately restful hour I’d given myself in weeks.
The romanticise-your-life trend is at its best when you stop trying to perform it and just… do one small, deliberate thing. Not for the aesthetic. Not for the reel. Just because you’re here, in your ordinary, slightly chaotic, deeply unglamorous life — and that’s actually worth paying attention to.
Even if your neighbour’s dog is the villain in your film.
Even if the pasta pot doesn’t soak itself.
Even if your husband will, without fail, mention the yellow lid recycle bin.