Heart-Shaped Jacuzzi Hotels: Kitsch, Romance, or Both?

You are doing it again. It is 11:40 on a Tuesday night and you are three tabs deep into hotel listings for a weekend that does not have dates yet. Your partner is asleep, or pretending to be, and the blue light of your phone is the only thing moving in the room.

You have scrolled past the boutique hotels with the clean lines and the neutral palettes, the ones that photograph well and say the right things about your taste. You have bookmarked two, maybe three. They are fine. They are tasteful. You would post either of them without a second thought.

Then you see it.

A tub. Shaped like a heart. Not tucked into a corner or cropped out of the listing photo. Just there, sitting in the middle of a wood-paneled room like it has nothing to apologize for.

You tilt your phone. Not away from anyone in particular. Just a small, instinctive rotation, the way you would angle a screen if someone walked past your desk. Nobody is watching. You tilt it anyway.

You screenshot it. You do not send the screenshot. It sits in your camera roll between a photo of a recipe you will never make and a picture of your dog mid-yawn. You close the listing, open it again. You type "heart-shaped jacuzzi hotel" into a search bar and feel the faint absurdity of each word as your thumb lands on it. Heart. Shaped. Jacuzzi.

The results load. There are hundreds. Not buried in novelty travel blogs or bachelor-party listicles, but on booking sites, with reviews, and couples in the photos who look like they are having a good time. You read one review, then four. The ratings are high. Suspiciously high.

You close the phone. Open it. Close it.

Here is the thing you are not saying, even to yourself: you want to go. Not ironically. Not as a joke you would explain to friends over brunch. You want to sit in a heart-shaped tub with the person sleeping next to you and feel something simple and warm and undefended. And you are not sure when that became a difficult thing to admit.

We got to Berlin, Ohio, on a Friday in early October. The light came in flat and gold, and the whole landscape looked like it was painted by someone with steady hands and limited ambitions. The drive from Columbus was ninety minutes of highway giving way to two-lane roads, then farmland. The land was so level you could see the curve of the earth if you squinted. Buggies appeared. Hand-lettered signs for bulk foods and handmade quilts. A shop that sold nothing but cheese.

The cabin was set back from the road, one of a cluster, each angled for privacy. Wood siding, a small porch, trees close enough to hear in the wind. We checked in at the main house, where the woman behind the desk handed us a key and a breakfast menu and said "You two have a wonderful time" with a warmth so genuine it almost made me nervous.

Inside: wood paneling, a stone fireplace, a bed with more pillows than two people could reasonably use. And there, in the open space between the bed and the window, the tub. Heart-shaped. Cream-colored. Raised on a platform like a small stage.

We both laughed. Not at it, exactly. More at the fact of being in the same room with it, the way you laugh when something you have only seen in photos turns out to be three-dimensional and large enough to sit in. I took a picture. My partner said, "Don't you dare post that." I said I would not. I did not mention that I had already texted it to my sister.

The first hour was the ironic hour. We made the jokes we came prepared to make. We called it "the love tub." We took a selfie with exaggerated faces. We did the bit. The bit was a way of handling the sincerity of the object by putting distance between ourselves and it. Fine. We did the bit. We got it out of our systems.

Then we turned the water on.

The tub filled slowly. The jets started. The room got warm and the mirrors fogged and at some point we stopped taking pictures and got in. The water was very hot. The jets hit the lower back in a way that made me exhale a sound I did not plan to make. My partner was on the other side of the heart, which sounds absurd as I write it, but in the moment the geometry just meant she was close enough to talk to and far enough to stretch out. Our knees touched under the water occasionally. The wood ceiling was above us. Outside, through the window, nothing but trees and the last of the daylight.

The heart shape stopped being a shape. It became the container, the way any tub is a container, and what was inside it was warm water and a person I chose and the particular quiet that happens when two people stop performing for each other. Not a dramatic silence. Not a meaningful pause. Just the sound of jets and breathing and occasionally a sentence that did not need a response.

We stayed in longer than we planned. The water cooled and we ran more hot. We talked about nothing consequential: a restaurant we wanted to try in the morning, whether the fireplace was gas or wood, a thing that happened at work on Wednesday that was funny only to us. The heart shape was below us, around us, and it mattered exactly as much as the shape of any bathtub has ever mattered. It gave the water somewhere to be.

We got out when our fingers pruned. The tile was cold. We left wet footprints across the floor, two sets, mine longer and narrower than hers. The bed was better than it looked. Through the wall, the absolute nothing of an Amish country night: no traffic, no music, no sirens. A silence so complete it felt architectural.

In the morning, breakfast arrived in a basket on the porch. We ate in bed. The tub sat across the room, empty now, the heart shape visible from above like a diagram of something obvious. I did not take a picture of it empty. I wish I had.

The heart-shaped bathtub has a birthplace, and it is the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Morris Wilkins, owner of Cove Haven Resort, introduced it in the 1960s alongside champagne-glass whirlpools and ceiling mirrors. He built a honeymoon empire that peaked in the 1980s and became, by the mid-1990s, the go-to shorthand for romantic excess in American comedy. The Poconos earned that reputation honestly. They invented a form of hospitality that said: the room is not where you sleep between activities. The room is the activity. The tub is the room.

What happened next was not the tub's fault. The irony turn of the late twentieth century came for the heart-shaped bathtub with particular enthusiasm. The same instinct that made earnest love songs into punch lines, that turned "romantic" into a synonym for "trying too hard," found the perfect target. Too literal. Too shaped like the thing it meant.

By 2005, the heart-shaped tub was cultural shorthand for bad taste. Not the interesting, transgressive kind. The kind that made people say "yikes" and mean it. They showed up in Reddit threads and "worst hotel photos" listicles. The comments were full of people performing sophistication by laughing at a bathtub. Meanwhile, those same properties sold out on Valentine's Day, on anniversaries, on random October weekends. Couples drove ninety minutes from Columbus for reasons they might not have articulated.

Because here is what the punchline never accounts for: the numbers. Donna's Premier Lodging, a collection of adults-only cabins in Berlin, Ohio, the geographic heart of the world's largest Amish community, has over 1,300 reviews and a perfect rating across every one of them. Something happened in those rooms that felt worth recording. The tub was there when it happened.

Gatlinburg has them. The Catskills still have them. Small towns in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania have them, in cabins and inns and motor lodges that never remodeled because their guests never asked them to. The heart-shaped tub persisted not as a relic but as a product that works. The market never rejected it. The market kept booking it. What changed was not demand. What changed was what people were willing to say out loud about what they wanted.

And here is where Berlin, Ohio, becomes more than a setting. The Amish community surrounding Donna's Premier did not rediscover sincerity. They never lost it. Plain dress, plain speech, handmade everything. And in the middle of this community, someone built cabins with heart-shaped tubs. Not as a contradiction. As an offering. A room designed around the premise that two people came here to be close to each other, and the room should make that easy.

There are no quotation marks around the romance in Berlin, Ohio. The tub is shaped like a heart because the heart is the shape we use for love, and the tub is for lovers, and the logic is that plain. The 1,300 people who reviewed it were not standing outside it. They were in the water.

The question, then, is not whether the heart-shaped tub is kitsch or romance. That framing accepts the premise that those categories are opposites, that an object must be either tasteful or sincere, and it cannot be both. The heart-shaped tub rejects the question. It holds warm water. It holds two people. It is shaped like the thing it is for. Embarrassment requires an audience. The tub does not have one.

You are still on your phone. Or you closed it and opened it again, the way you do. The listing is still there, the one with the heart-shaped tub in the photo, the one you screenshotted and did not send.

You know what you felt, reading that scene. You felt the warm water. You felt the quiet. You felt the specific, private tenderness of being in a small space with someone you love and not needing to be clever about it. And you felt something else, smaller and harder to name: the relief of not performing.

The heart-shaped tub is a room that has already committed to being romantic so you do not have to pretend you are not trying. The tub absorbed the earnestness into its shape. You just get in the water and be with the person you came with.

The hesitation you felt at the top of this piece was real. Someone taught you that taste and open feeling are incompatible. That a bathtub can be cool or it can be shaped like a heart, but not both. You learned this from a culture that spent twenty years teaching you to be clever before you were kind, to be presented before you were honest.

The next time you are scrolling late at night, the listing will appear. The tub. The wood paneling. Reviews so earnest they almost hurt to read. You will hover over it. You will feel the tilt of the phone, the instinct to angle the wanting away from view.

Maybe this time, you do not.

In a cabin in Ohio, the morning is quiet. The tub sits empty, its shape visible from the doorway, the water long drained. Two towels on the tile. Light through the window, gray and ordinary. The tub holds nothing now. It does not need to.