Why is it so hard to find a man that knows how to truly romance a woman. I mean like dinner, conversation, opening doors, etc....and excpecting nothing in return at the end of the night except a kiss.
This is a question I stumbled upon on a Craigslist ad. The answer is actually pretty simple, although hard to say just right: You're expecting the wrong thing from the wrong people.
Sharing meals, having good conversation, being polite, and not expecting anything in return are what you do with people that you care about--with everyone that you care about. Coworkers, classmates, exes, that nice girl you met, that nice guy you met, that nice transvestite or transsexual you met, anyone.
Caring about people--giving them affection, and giving them a piece of your time, wanting them to be part of your world--is not romance, and if you expect that sort of thing to only be found in romance... people who truly believe that are going to be jerks, exactly because they're not nice to the people they care about by habit. And if you find someone who gives affection to everyone around them and try to get them to give it only to you--because you believe that doing otherwise betrays your "romance"--you will hurt them, hurt the people they care about, and make your own world a sadder place.
Nobody who is genuine treats the people that they love differently than they treat everyone else around them. If you want to see men who are gentlemen, who enjoy taking meals with you, who enjoy talking with you, then you must encourage them to do so even when it doesn't benefit you. If you encourage them to only think about the person they're Romancing, then they will only do these things when they want something from you--your relationship and most likely sex.
All flowers--from the most beautiful, to weeds--grow from their roots, into whatever ground they are planted in. If you want a flower to grow strong and healthy, you must care for its needs, which is a tedious business. You must understand that we are all gardeners, and we are all flowers. If you neglect the flowers that you pass by every day, you will most likely neglect the one flower you truly mean to cultivate, if only by force of habit. And those that you find truly are good at tending to flowers, the true Romantics, only learned how by being good gardeners, every day, to everyone.
