Romance

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.

Gender Wounds

I feel like the genders have been damaged, on purpose, in order to make them a 'match' for each other. By damaged, I mean that each side has been told to do and be something, rather than a normal, thinking, feeling purpose, solely so that someone can fill a role that by rights, they should be fulfilling on their own. It's a sort of... "You won't be liked for yourself; you'll be liked based on standards." So men try to be useful, and women try to be pretty, and neither of them focus on what they'd do if they ever convinced a mate to be interested in them.

It's stupid. Any man worth pining for has more nuanced interests than breast size, and most won't run out on a romance because you're average rather than pretty. Any woman worth lusting after isn't going to spend her entire childhood learning to look pretty--because once you and she are past the banging stage and gotten settled down, all those years she dedicated to looking pretty are either going to be no longer useful, or else she's cheating on you. Well, movie stars excepted, I suppose.

Now mostly, I think, men get the better side of that deal. On the other hand, men are supposed to be easily seduced--that's the whole point of the "women looking good" obsession, after all. Look good, get a man, end of story. If the man is married happily, well then, ruin his life, because he's supposed to still be seduceable. Oh, that panicked look on his face where he feels the bonds that are precious to him slipping away? He'll get over it. After all, you have tits. Whoo.

And then there's women. Okay, you got a guy, you got married, maybe you even got a kid, maybe the kid's even grown. If you fell for the stupid bullshit, you now no longer have any purpose, even though you're still alive. What do you do? Look pretty again? Have more kids? You didn't spend your formative years on something silly like, you know, hobbies, or ambitions, or a career.

Are people actually like this? No. Fortunately, even the worst cases will likely hit a hard time, fall out of the storybook, and land on their feet, even if they scrape their knees on the way down. The point isn't that people are forever scarred by this, it's that the feeling is there, and frankly speaking, that feeling does not trust human beings to be human beings. It does not trust them to be able to deal with the opposite sex in a rational way, in spite of thousands of years of breeding, and it tries to force them to be something they're not. Most people, except maybe a crazed subset, will end up normal in the end, because normal is the way humans were designed.

But I'd like to see something better in this world--I'd like to see a place where people weren't expected by friends, relatives, and suitors to be something other than humans with their own thoughts, feelings, ambitions, and standards. I don't know what I can do to help the world be like that, but I'll certainly try to do my part.

But it's really not all that easy. After all, I, too, like tits. Guess I must just be a man.

On dealing with people

I consider this a basic summation of what I believe when it comes to people.

This is what is:

Their Nature

Their Meaning & Path

Their Expectations

Their Hopes & Dreams

Their Quality

Their Health (of Heart and Mind)

If they are someone you care about, you must find out what they are, and if you cannot, you cannot trust them. When you know what they are:

If they are not in health, you never ignore them, no matter the trouble.

If they are of the best quality, you never abandon them, no matter the cost.

You never ask them to betray their nature, no matter the utility in doing so.

You never demand they forget their own meaning, no matter your own troubles.

You never spit on their dreams, no matter how big or small.

You meet their expectations as much as your own nature and path allow you, no matter what your dreams or expectations are.

You expect no less of them, no matter their nature, path, expectations, or dreams. Some allowance is made for health, but even then, you gauge their quality by the things they do, and the things they don't, compared to what they can.

The Real Thing

I think I know what bothers me about... a lot of things. People who aren't professional; liars; and in general, the entire culture of people who simply seem to not take the world seriously.

Not surprisingly, the problem is in fact that they don't take the world seriously.

By not taking the world seriously, I mean that they seem to view it as a cheap toy--something for which there is a trick, a funny little thing that makes it do what you want, and that's it. The people aren't real people; the problems aren't real problems. It's just a lot of pretty lights, exciting times to be had, and a bunch of squares that are looking to screw up your daily contact high.

Similarly, when it comes to getting out of miserable times, the same people--and I am one at times--view the world like a puzzle, and a cheap one, where whatever the answer is, there is one, and it's something fairly simple. Play with things, and don't worry about doing things you don't want to--the world is only a toy, after all, and it can't make you do unhappy things. And people who accept that you "have to do unhappy things" still seem to want to relapse into this view that the world isn't really complicated--just cruel.

The world is something to take seriously. It can kick your butt while you're looking for the off switch. It will look at you funny when you twist it left and right looking for the "trick". The world will never be a $5 game at Wal-Mart. It's a real thing, and the only way to face it successfully is to be a real thing in response--alive, looking, learning, not becoming a cheap mockery of mankind by settling into patterns that end up leading nowhere.

Where the idea that we can be fake comes from, I don't know. But wherever it's found, it should be unceremoniously smacked upside the head.