Buying flowers or a dinner is not romantic. You will spend money, feel frustrated. The most important point is you will feel empty (besides your wallet) and you will not know why. Anything that involves spending money is not romantic. It can not be, because Romanticism by definition is a rebellion against classic conceptions.
Today our society is markedly rational and anti-romantic. The skyscrapers are linear in construction and more functional. Few people are building anything Baroque, rather, homes are more cookie cutter than Victorian for example.
There is a high premium on functionality and optimal utilization of scares personal resources. Similarly people find practical, efficient ways to find a date, like a dating app.
However, if you are quixotic and joust a few windmills you will get the girl or guy and feel better about yourself.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing
Helen Keller
You want to be someone who takes out a newspaper ad like this:
Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.
-Safety Not Guaranteed
You want to be a eccentric, genius, bold and beautiful. Reader, listen to me, you are a young man. You are sitting on your computer. You have the whole world ahead of you. I am asking you to be a man and try.
For example, a friend of mine, recently pulled out all stops and moved to Kiev. That is living a life of adventure. That is the start of a romantic life. He left safety and stability behind. He has skin in the game.
- I recommend you play for more than you can afford to lose, than you will learn the game.
If you want to get the girl or if you are female and want to find a husband, be romantic. Its not a thought but a life. Do something radical like move to another country. Not a vacation mind you, but pack up a move. You do not have to move, but wake up and change your life in a radical way, a way of adventure and Romanticism, that is lasting. Build a Cordwood house in the wilderness, bike across the country, walk the Appalachian trail, build a time machine, but change your life.
After sometime you will wake up and see the world with new eyes.
Now look with your… new eyes
What did you see?
No words can describe it.
Might as well ask Heaven what it sees.
No human can know.
The world had changed,
yet stayed the same.Like a new born vampire weeping at the beauty of the night.
Anne Rice
Romantic dating vs Realistic dating
Both genders complain about dating today. Yet the conceptual framework they have been given, has been handed to them by psychologists, popular cultural mores and relationship advisors.
People think in terms of alpha males and rules and tips for dating or conventions about how other people date and interact. Others think in terms of how to fit traditional roles into the dating context, such as, the man should make the decisions and be the breadwinner, and use words like, ‘genetics’ and ‘evolution’ as evidence to support their thesis.
- I am not saying that some of the ideas are not without merit, rather, they will fill your head with ideas, and still no wife or husband or at least not the prince or princess of your adolescent fantasies.
- Why? Because romantic love is always a subconscious fantasy come to life.
- It can not come to life by thinking about it. You must come to life.
The farthest distance is between the head and the heart
What about money? Money seem to have become the magic pixie dust people use to attract a mate. Guys think since they have a stable job they deserve a girl. Some even go as far as flashing their ‘blue passport’ and subconsciously dangle this as bait.
Let me be perfectly clear. The Excel spreadsheets or cube job or whatever way you make your living has nothing to do with love and finding your mate, nor does your house you own or any stability you put out there. Those jobs mean nothing. You think they are important but they actually might imped your Pilgrims Progress.
- Being stabe when you are single is actually a little sad.
Be the last of the Romantics
If you want to really get the girl or guy, you need to jettison these classical sterile conceptions that are arguments to your rational brain, and look no further than the Romantic movement for inspiration.
Romanticism was a latter 18th Century and Early 19th Century movement in most recent times. However, the society generally oscillates every few centuries between rationalism and Romanticism in some form. That is beyond the scope of this discussion, but a worthy study, or something to be contemplated.
How to be a Romantic in the 21st Century
You can not imitate the past verbatim. You have to take inspiration and forge a new meaning of Romanticism today. Going to an art museum and meditating on paintings of Albert Bierstadt or any great artist, reading Emerson, Thoreau, Stoker, Tolstoy or Austen or any such authors listed here: Romanticism and idealism or understanding what it mean here What is Romanticism – This will have greater influence on your dating life than yet another right swipe with your index finger on your cell phone.
Study the past to create some distance from the present so we can understand our present in all dimensions and take up arms against the ennui of our time.
Then start contemplating some great escape from your current life.
Romanticism appeals to the subconscious.
Here is a scene from Last of the Mohegans. When a proper high society girl finds herself in a savage wildness with perils all around her.
You are right, Mr. Poe. We do not
Cora (beautiful young lady)
understand what is happening here.
And it is not as I imagined it would be,
thinking of it in Boston and London …
Sorry to disappoint you …
Hawkeye
On the contrary. It is more deeply stirring …
Cora
to my blood …
… than any imagining could possibly have
been …
You want to be that. That is your 1 step.
You do not want to know it in your mind, but live it in your heart and life in reality.
Better to be living in a cabin in the wildness with the girl of your dreams than trapped in a relationship under the bars of convention and the ‘best choice’.
The founder of Burt’s Bees meet his future wife hitchhiking and lived in a cabin in Maine. Contrast this with the Wall Street execs or even an Excel superuser or someone who dangles their stable life as bait to some woman.
What life do you really want? Yes, once you are married you build the nest, but not before. Think about being the last of the romantics and like Hawkeye and not fall for the conventions of the society that uses you.
OK, Mark so how do I:
‘How to be Romantic in 12 simple steps’, so I can get the girl’?
That is the paradox, you do not. Stay off Wikihow. Another symptom that we are living in a world of realism is the web has become the largest reciprocal for ‘how to’ advice.
In fact, in its current iteration, that is all it basically is, a how to book. This is based on user experience algorithms, that supposedly lead users to efficient sequestering of information. I wonder if I just bought a set of World Book Encyclopedias from a thrift shop, instead of the Internet, I would be better off?
The web has become ADD and practical because it is designed by programmers, and subsequently shaped by AI. So the sites they serve on the SERP (search engine result pages) are, yes, the ones the programmers and AI think you should see based on their determinate criteria that deem important.
By default, programmers and soulless machines are giving your dating advice
Yes, that is it. So you are basically taking dating advice from programmers when you search the web? Yes. The practical, realistic pages are what people are reading and the mobile dating apps are designed this way and there you have it. They are influencing your subconscious and reinforcing the paradigm.
You get more of what you reinforce
– first law of psychology
- The world is reinforcing the paradigm of rationalism.
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.
-Jorge Luis Borges
Become aware of the art of rebellion
The hopeless romantics are in full retreat or do not exist anymore. Like Jedi Knights, they have faded into our mythology.
People have resign themselves to the philosophy of ‘the best we can do is find a wife or husband on a dating app that fits our criteria the best, optimize our selection when it is our time, and move forward with marriage’. This is a bit utilitarian for me.
Me, I would rather be single or a Trappist monk. At least those guys have a soul.
So how do we change all this and shift the paradigm, get the girl and live happily ever after? We do not. I am not on some crusade to shift the paradigm of extreme rationalism, the matrix we live in today.
I am simply here to make you aware that a veil has been pulled over your eyes.
My suggestion to you is study what Romanticism is about. Nature, transcendence, the individual over the needs of the many and most important imagination. You do not have to be Lord Byron or Gothic. Rather, I simply do not shallow the pill of rationalism so quickly.
Maybe there is more in heaven and earth that our science and philosophy has not dreamed of. Maybe you want to live the life in the spirit of two centuries ago and go on some crusade to save your soul from the godless machine of our time.
So Kenneth why are you looking for a partner? The world is full of jenkholes. But I believe there are purists out there, that is why I put that ad in the paper.
Safety No Guaranteed
Feel the fear and do it anyway and take risks. Your eyes will be open and you will see beauty where others do not.
There is a strange beauty in dis-proportionality.
You will discover the people society think beautiful are subconsciously grotesque, and the ones people never look at, because of some dis-proportionality of character or form, are enchanting, like characters in a fairy-tale.
Anyone who does not dream their life away is wasting their life.
Mark Biernat
If you radically transform your life, and live as the idealist, the romantic, the rebel, the dreamer, your life might not be on such a smooth course as it is now.
However, once you radically transform your life, the hardest decision will be who do you marry?… Snow White, Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty?