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The Unromantic Lens

The Unromantic Lens

Written by: Leyton LeMar
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About this listen

 The Unromantic Lens is a podcast about what happens when love is asked to replace institutions. We were promised that freeing relationships from tradition would make them healthier, more fulfilling, and more authentic. Instead, dating has become volatile, commitment feels dangerous, and intimacy collapses under expectations it was never meant to carry. Marriage lost authority. Family lost structure. Romantic love was promoted to the highest ideal — and then forced to do all the work. This podcast examines how the shift from duty to desire, from institution to emotion, and from permanence to choice quietly destabilised modern relationships. It treats marriage as infrastructure, family as a stabilising system, and dating as the pressure point where cultural fantasies meet reality. There’s no advice here. No therapy scripts. No nostalgia for the past. Just a clear-eyed analysis of how modern love became fragile — not because people are broken, but because the structures that once held intimacy steady were dismantled and never replaced. If love feels heavier than it should… If commitment feels like a gamble rather than a foundation… If family feels both absent and impossible to escape… This podcast doesn’t reassure you. It explains what you’re living inside.Copyright 2026 Leyton LeMar Philosophy Relationships Social Sciences
Episodes
  • When Fantasy Serves — And When It Costs [Fantasy Market Archive]

    When Fantasy Serves — And When It Costs [Fantasy Market Archive]
    Feb 12 2026

    Fantasy is not the enemy.

    But it must be contained.

    This final episode closes the Fantasy Market arc by distinguishing when fantasy functions as information — and when it becomes interference. Fantasy serves when it points. It costs when it decides.

    With this calibration, desire becomes clearer, calmer, and no longer self-consuming — preparing the ground for the next market: Transaction.
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    6 mins
  • Fantasy Exhaustion - [Fantasy Market Archive]

    Fantasy Exhaustion - [Fantasy Market Archive]
    Feb 12 2026

    There is a kind of tiredness that comes not from effort, but from prolonged desire.

    This episode examines fantasy exhaustion — what happens when imagination consumes more energy than reality can replenish. When desire escalates without resolution, numbness, cynicism, and disengagement often follow.

    This is not a loss of desire.

    It’s an overdraft.
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    6 mins
  • Fantasy Spillover - [Fantasy Market Archive]

    Fantasy Spillover - [Fantasy Market Archive]
    Feb 12 2026

    Fantasy does not stay contained.

    It leaks.

    This episode explores how unexamined imagination spills into transactions, emotional bonds, and real-world interactions — distorting boundaries, expectations, leverage, and perception. Many men blame later mistakes for outcomes that were decided upstream.

    Fantasy spillover explains why the same disappointments repeat across different situations.
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    6 mins
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