anti-romantic

American  

[an-tee-roh-man-tik, an-tahy-] / ˌæn ti roʊˈmæn tɪk, ˌæn taɪ- /

Or antiromantic

adjective

1. not involving love or romance.

   One way to ignore Valentine's Day is to do something on the anti-romantic end of the spectrum and watch some horror movies with other single friends.

2. characterized by or portraying a view of love and relationships that is practical rather than idealized, and often transactional or circumstantial.

   The anti-romantic comedy-drama espouses a frank and scathing view of sexual relations.

3. realistic; pragmatic; practical.

   It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults.

   His anti-romantic poetry is a reaction to the real and immediate experience of war, depicted in all its scarring reality.

4. Sometimes anti-Romantic in a style that is unlike or in opposition to the romantic style in music, art, literature, etc..

   The composer’s works incorporate experimentalism in a way that is decidedly anti-romantic.

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Other Word Forms

• anti-romantically adverb
• antiromantically adverb

Etymology

Origin of anti-romantic

anti- ( def. ) + romantic ( def. )

Example Sentences

“But just as romance has to understand the potential for sadness, the resolutely anti-romantic Yang knows you need a dollop of romance if you want to break your readers’ hearts.”

From Seattle Times • Sep. 8, 2021

Set in and around Sydney, it starts off as a kind of anti-romantic comedy, with a chance meeting between two twenty-somethings that leads to an impromptu camping trip.

From New York Times • Apr. 28, 2021

In some ways, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s focus on spoofing rom-com clichés has always made it seem like an anti-romantic comedy.

From The Guardian • Nov. 13, 2018

Merciless toward its characters as well as the audience, "The Graduate" plays on a new viewing like a subversive, anti-romantic film best categorized as a bleak parody of the happily-ever-after genre.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 20, 2017

It will not do, of course, to lay too much stress on Thackeray, whose profession was satire and whose temper purely anti-romantic.

From A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century by Beers, Henry A. (Henry Augustin)