Today’s relatively short and hastily written post is going to address a subject that may not be for everyone. I’m sure that more than a few of my readers will not care for it at all. It is bound to generate some heated debate and disagreement.
The subject, of course, is romance.
Recently I was engaged in a conversation with a young woman who reads my blog on occasion and she indicated that she didn’t believe that men cared about romance at all. I disagreed, and asked why she thought that. She pointed towards the manosphere/androsphere and the fact that most of the men in that community deride romance. Apparently for her discovering the ‘sphere had been something of an epiphany, as it had informed her that men weren’t interested in romance. While cautioning that the ‘sphere isn’t necessarily an accurate cross-section of men, I disagreed with her conclusion that the ‘sphere demonstrates that most men aren’t romantic or otherwise have no sense of romance.
If anything, I explained, the rise and “success” of the ‘sphere owes to the fact that men are the more romantic of the sexes [an area where Rollo and I are in agreement]. The reason why so many men find their way here, in fact the reason the ‘sphere exists, is in large part because many men were romantic for a large part of their lives. And that it didn’t work very well for them.
Men might not be very romantic, but if so then women are even less romantic. For all their talk of romance and its associated trappings- flowers, poetry, letters and the like, women these days sure don’t hesitate to associate themselves with men who display zero interest in romance. And by associate I mean sleep with, if not pursue (and sometimes get) relationships with, such men. As for those men who are interested in romance… well, the word Incel doesn’t exist because some guy got bored and decided to make something up.
If the men in these parts don’t seem very romantically inclined, I would argue it is because their romantic nature was burned out of them. By women. And by extension poor advice from other men. Men can only sustain so many rejections…. they can only watch for so long as women abandon the romantics for the players and cads whose idea of a gift is skittles… and men can only tolerate so much betrayal before their sense of romance collapses in on itself and dies like a red giant turning into a white dwarf.
She disagreed. Instead of believing that most men start as romantics, she argued that most men took to romance only because they thought it would work. That it would get them the female attention they so greatly (and desperately) desired. I started to compose an argument to rebut hers, but then realized that I was basing most of what I would say on just myself. As someone who was (from an early age) and still is, a romantic at heart, I would naturally disagree that most men are just mercenary about romance. The thing is, I don’t actually know that most men are really like that. I’m not exactly an average male in a number of ways, and I know I’m not a representative sample.
So while I understand the sample size is small, I’m hoping my male readers here can chime in. Do you consider yourself a romantic? If you aren’t now, where you a romantic at some point in the past, before the world turned you away from romance? What caused you to lose your sense of romance?
