Love, romantic movies, and chivalry...

So let's open on a standard Hollywood romantic comedy. The girl, awkward, falls for our dashing hero.

Our dashing hero makes a sweeping gesture that makes all the women in the audience go "awww".

But if it happened in real life from a guy she'd known such a short time, the title would be changed to "While you were sleeping...I filed a restraining order".

So where is the disconnect? It is amazing to look at how Hollywood distorts things after you have realized it, and see both how it affected you, and how you unknowingly applied it to your own life.

In my instance, I have been a hopeless romantic since I figured out that girls didn't have cooties. Or, if they did, I wanted their cooties.

Ok, that sounds dirty. Forget I said that.

I would hear of how girls melted over the latest romantic situation set up by hollywood, and I would plan.

The thought was to give them the experience they seemed to idolize in films and such, they would react like the movies they idolized.

Needless to say, I would creep them the f*ck out.

This is not to say that I emulated what hollywood shoveled out like a mindless consumerist automaton.

The error creeped up not in my desire to be a romantic, but in my application of those desires.

So, in my desire to NOT scare women off, I've squashed my desire to apply romance to any of my attempts to start a relationship.

Since doing that, all the material I've read, and the issues from my first relationship, point to the fact that such grandiose gestures give the impression as to being a bit of a doormat, leaving most women with nothing left to respect. No balanced girl would want to be in a relationship with such a person.

Now that I am in a relationship, it's hard to allow those muscles to be flexed again. I have a girl that seems to like spending time with me, and I with her.

I do want to express it, but I have problems putting my guard down and showing her, for fear of scaring her off with something too big.

So, in short: women need to make up their minds when it comes to expressions of initial interest and romance. Either go for the big gestures, or don't.

But stop messing us up.

Pick one.

Either you continue to point to romantic comedies and such and not get freaked out when it happens to you, or stop propping up these contrivances of actual romance.

Another thought is: where does chivalry fit into all this? And I think that deserves a second exploration.

Chivalry is not what you do to impress someone. Chivalry is when your hand is forced into doing a particular behavior that benefits someone else not out of a desire to impress them, but out of a sense of ethics and honor.

Every time I open a door for what turns out to be a radical feminist, and she responds with "I could have opened it myself, you pig" or the like, I feel like spinning them around and explaining that I'm not doing it for their benefit. It is my part in making for a more polite society, and if they don't like it, I've got a finger for them.

It's 2AM. I miss her. 'Ay me, sad hours seem long'

Ok, side note: I've never had a song make me want to buy a video game. But I might just go get Endless Ocean because of this song. The games I've reviewed seem to tell a story of a game that is just as beautiful as the song.