I Grew Up Watching Romance Movies Set In Ireland. Then I Found My Own Love Story There

After a horse-and-carriage ride through Killarney National Park, an enchanted emerald forest in southwestern Ireland, I walked through the old countryside town, my fingers brushing against stone walls as I tried to imagine a history hundreds of years old, mist from a sympathetic raincloud dampening my skin. It felt like a scene ripped from a historical romance screenplay that I’d watch from my living room in Orlando, Florida, charmed and a little envious of the women onscreen, except it was real life. My life.

I was heading back to my hotel with a group of women who had been strangers just a week before. Now, we were co-travelers, bonded by inside jokes and, moments later, a darkening nimbostratus cloud hovering above that made us regret walking the scenic route instead of hailing a taxi.

Then, from a red light, a man driving a horse-drawn carriage noticed the concern in our faces and called out, “Need a lift?” What in my period-drama fantasies was happening? The four of us looked at one another, giggled, and — as women of the 21st-century, liberated from strict social codes and calling card etiquette — decided to do it for the shelter and the plot. Darting through traffic, we climbed aboard the rig, where three Irish gentlemen greeted us and whisked us back toward our hotel.

Growing up, I fell in love with Ireland because it was the setting of so many of my favorite romance films. “P.S. I Love You” taught me that romance would arrive the moment I, the reserved, goody-two-shoes, threw back a shot of Jameson, let my hair down, and did something feral like sing terribly at a small-town pub. “Leap Year” showed me that love would come when I embraced folktales and whimsicality, sparking a decadeslong desire to roll down the country’s lush, billowing hills. “Brooklyn” helped me realize that great love could appear in unexpected people, places, and times in our lives. 

So when I decided to take EF Ultimate Break’s Women Traveling Solo trip, I knew I’d go to Ireland. Long ago, the portrayals of the verdant country in 2000s- and 2010s-era romance flicks stole my heart — and all these years later, the young hopeless romantic in me still hoped for my very own Irish love story.

During the nine-day excursion, which I did alongside 20-plus young women from all over the U.S., we traveled throughout the country, with overnight stays in Dublin, Kilkenny, Killarney, and Galway. In each city, I lived like the protagonists of those films, open to the mysterious journeys that lay ahead and hungry for adventure. I also felt unencumbered. Liberation felt contagious in that socialist country that fought long and hard for its own sovereignty, allowing me to similarly feel free in both my body and spirit.

I spent my first night in Dublin pub-hopping through Temple Bar, the lively cultural quarter in Central Dublin, eventually shimmying my way into the perpetually packed tourist stop The Temple Bar Pub. Inside, I ducked to dodge overflowing pints of Guinness held above my head and grabbed onto strangers when I slipped on beer spilled on the sticky floor. Eventually, I made it to a small table in front of the stage, where a band was playing a series of songs from the movie “Grease.” Beside me was a tall, blond English man who was also there on holiday and told me he had played Danny in his high school play. That night, I became his Sandy. The two of us sang-yelled our way through the cheesy ’70s classics like we meant every melodramatic lyric. It was a motion picture-style meet-cute, reminiscent of that pub scene in “P.S. I Love You” where Gerry (Gerard Butler) sings “Galway Girl” to Holly (Hilary Swank). We laughed and took videos of our performance. And then I slipped out the side door, joining my group of travelers outside, knowing we’d never see each other again, knowing I didn’t want to. That playful coquetry was enough for me.

When my feet began to throb after miles of walking on cobblestone streets, a few of the girls I had just met that morning offered to walk back to the hotel with me, one even stopping every other block to wait when I needed a break and insisting I stop apologizing every time I told her how sorry and embarrassed I was to be that girl.

* * *

The next day, we embarked on a walking tour, me in REI hiking boots that were much more suitable for the rock-paved roads than the previous night’s heels. Walking along a bridge over the River Liffey, where Viking fleets once sailed, raided, and established a settlement that would become Dublin more than a thousand years ago, we learned about Ireland’s long, brutal history of colonization. 

At Dublin Castle, we were told about the Norman invasion of Ireland and how, after arriving in 1169, the Anglo-Normans began establishing their foothold in Dublin, eventually using the castle as a defensive fortification. Over the centuries, the English Crown expanded its control across Ireland, and the castle became the center of English, and eventually British, rule. There, the Lord Lieutenant, the British monarch’s representative in Ireland, governed on behalf of the Crown, overseeing the administration of everything from government, land, policing, religion, and courts. 

For Irish nationalists, the castle came to embody violent colonial power. In 1916, Irish republicans attempted to seize Dublin Castle as part of their effort to overthrow British rule in a rebellion now remembered as the Easter Rising. While rebels, a mix of revolutionary artists, teachers, and political organizers, failed to capture it — and its leaders, including the poet Patrick Pearse and labor organizer James Connolly, were executed — the failed uprising ultimately ignited the movement that led to Irish independence.

As a Puerto Rican, whose homeland was also colonized by a European imperial power, Spain, before being invaded and seized by the United States — which still maintains control over the archipelago — this history deeply resonated with me. Throughout the trip, I began drawing parallels between our islands’ histories of colonization and resistance. 

Both have experienced brutality from their colonizers, from massacres of our nationalist leaders, to the seizure and contamination of our lands, to attempts to suppress our languages and cultures.

Both were also abandoned amid devastating crises. During the Great Famine, Ireland was forced to continue exporting food to Great Britain even as its people starved, with about 1 million people dying. Nearly two centuries later, when Hurricane María wrecked Puerto Rico in 2017, the island’s colonial status and the failures of the federal response compounded the catastrophe. A Harvard-led study found there were 4,645 deaths in the months following the storm, many of them attributed to delayed or prevented medical care.

Similarly, both islands were emptied by these histories, creating diasporas that today outnumber the populations living on the islands themselves.

Understanding this shared history, when our tour guide walked us to a building with The Proclamation of the Irish Republic scrawled on its wall, he called on me to read a passage: “We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people.” 

He then looked at me and said something like, “May this be an inspiration for you and the Puerto Rican people to never stop fighting for a freedom that belongs to you.” With goosebumps bubbling all over my skin and my eyelids heavy with tears, I thanked him, remembering all I knew about Puerto Rican and Irish solidarity, from nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos studying the Irish independence movement to Irish-American lawyers representing Puerto Rican freedom fighters.

* * *

Later that night, at an old pub, I asked the musician serenading us tourists to perform The Cranberries’ “Linger,” slipping him a few euros in hopes he’d move it up on his setlist. It’s one of the many songs by the Irish band that I sing as passionately today as I did in the ’90s, now with the lived experience of knowing what it actually feels like to long for someone who is no good for you.

Making my way back to my seat with the rest of the girls, a group of men stopped me to chat. They asked where I was from, and when I responded, “Orlando,” the table erupted. They lived there, too. We started tossing out the names of high schools we attended and streets we lived on, surprised to have found one another thousands of miles away, in a centuries-old pub in Dublin. 

A man with a Dominican flag stitched onto his hat asked how long I’d be in the city. When I told him I’d be leaving for Kilkenny in the morning, he asked for my number. I gave him my Instagram handle instead. For the next 45 minutes, we smiled flirtatiously at each other, brushing against one another when “Linger” finally came on and I got up to sing and dance along. 

When I headed out to the next pub with my co-travelers, he gave me a goodbye kiss on the cheek, a customary caribeño farewell. But by the time I was back in my hotel room, there was something else: a DM asking me to stay one more night so we could see why fate brought the Puerto Rican and Dominican from Orlando together in Dublin. I felt him. Like Anna (Amy Adams) and Declan (Matthew Goode) from “Leap Year,” it seemed like our paths crossed for a reason. But, in real life, I wasn’t as invested in figuring out why. There were castles, fairy folklore, and the Cliffs of Moher ahead on our itinerary. I politely declined. 

I spent the rest of the trip gallivanting around the country with strangers who became mates whose coffee orders I remembered, photo angles I learned, and real-life worries I held. Together, we skipped across the rocks at the Lower Lake in Glendalough, pausing to stop and stare at gentle sheep, each of us in awe of the landscape we had only ever seen in pastoral Impressionist paintings. We twirled from Kilkenny Castle to Blarney Castle, simultaneously imagining ourselves as ladies of the court while critiquing the colonial wealth. When we made our way by horse-and-carriage to Ross Castle in Killarney, the women, who knew how desperately I wanted to roll down Ireland’s grassy hills, pointed out a safe place for me to make my childhood dream come true, right in front of the medieval ruin, even capturing my youthful awe and giggles as I went round and round on video. We petted a lamb named Snowy, hugged mossy trees, nearly flew away in the winds at the Cliffs of Moher, attempted our best kicks after watching a Celtic stepdance performance, and spun together amid the wildflowers, 330 feet above the Atlantic, on Inis Mór.

At Kyteler’s Inn, a public house in Kilkenny dating back to the 13th or 14th century, three of us sat down for dinner. We went because we were fascinated by the tale of a woman who once lived there, Dame Alice Kyteler, the first person to be condemned for witchcraft in Ireland after she was accused of bewitching and killing her husbands. But it was the local band that evening that kept us in our seats for hours. They sang story-driven folk songs. Some were call-and-response, and we learned to clap or yell back at the lyrics on cue. Others were too fast-paced for us to understand, but we laughed, overjoyed, nonetheless. But it was their performance of “Grace” that brought me to tears. The song is sung from the point of view of Joseph Plunkett, an Irish freedom fighter and leader of the 1916 Easter Rising. In it, he sings to his longtime sweetheart, Grace Gifford, whom he married in his prison cell just hours before he was scheduled to be executed by a British firing squad.

The song broke me. A tragic 20th-century Irish romance? That’s my kind of period drama. A real-life story of saying goodbye to someone you love far too soon? That’s a pain I know. A love for land, culture, and people so deep, a vision of freedom even after hundreds of years of cruel captivity? That’s a struggle I resonate with. 

Ireland is a land of romance, not just because of the Hollywood films that use its verdant fields and folklore as backdrops for some of my favorite cinematic love stories, but because love has guided its people for generations. 

Love is what fueled their fight for liberation amid massacres, oppression, and starvation. Love is what helped shape a socialist government rooted in equality and collective care. It’s why relatives still scarred by the trauma of the Famine ask, “Do you have enough?” instead of “How’s the food?” when feeding their communities. And it’s why so many in Ireland, just like others in Puerto Rico, are looking back and reclaiming languages, histories, cultures, agricultural practices, and folktales, unearthing what colonialism tried to bury.

* * *

We spent our last day of the trip in Galway, a bohemian seaport city on Ireland’s scenic west coast. It’s here that the Claddagh ring — a traditional Irish piece of jewelry featuring a heart to represent love, a crown to symbolize loyalty, and two clasped hands representing friendship — was first designed hundreds of years ago. While there are many legends surrounding the ring’s origins, it has been used for centuries to signal the wearer’s romantic relationship status. Depending on which hand it’s worn on and which direction the heart faces, the ring can reveal whether someone is single, in a relationship, engaged, or married.

Earlier in our Grand Tour of Ireland trip, a few of us decided to wait to buy our Claddagh rings until we made it to Galway, wanting to purchase them where the ring and myth were born. I bought a gold one with a delicate frame. That night, I wore mine at the beer garden at O’Connell’s Bar. It was on my right hand, with the heart facing outward, indicating that I was single and open to romance. And I found it. Not with the Irish gentleman who saved a damsel in distress on horse-and-carriage, not with the English millennial version of Danny Zuko, and not with the dominicano who apparently lives a few blocks away from where I grew up. I found it in the warmth of women-only travel and the enchanted rolling hills of Ireland.

That night, I sang nostalgic American pop hits at the top of my lungs with a group of women whom I might have gone a lifetime without ever knowing, on an island filled with beauty and heart that colonization tried, but failed, to extinguish. This is love, too.

This story was reported on a trip provided by EF Ultimate Break.

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