When watching this video, or any similar to it, notice how you feel physically before you hit play and then compare it to how you feel after viewing it. Is your heart rate elevated? Did you get a little fight-or-flight adrenal rush? We laugh to relieve the visceral anxiety we feel for this chump, but think of seeing this in terms of transferring this guy’s stress level to yourself. We know the ship is going to sink before we watch, but we feel, by order of degrees, what this guy is feeling by association to the point that it prompts a chemical response in us. Why?
Is it that through some psychologically evolved mechanism we’ve learned to protect ourselves in similar situations in our primal past? Think about what a man would have to believe in order to overcome that mechanism and place himself in a position of public ridicule that ALL depended on the woman’s response. This woman is mediocre at best – I’d rate her about an HB 5 – and this guy proposes to her in what he undoubtedly believes is a grand chivalric gesture. I’m sure he genuinely believed she’d appreciate his ‘vulnerability’ and create a cherished memory for them both as they gracefully age in their marriage. I doubt either of them will ever forget it now.
In some of the comments they were saying it was a set up, but what’s the point of that? Who’s benefiting from it?
And even if it was contrived, the real lesson being taught is from the ‘audience’ around them. People still want to believe that it was authentic. It’s still a pretty useful illustration of a beta mindset. How many guys like this want to believe that a woman will appreciate his romanticism? It is men who are the real romantics. It’s men who are the imaginative ones when it comes to romance, and all in an effort to provide a woman with the romantic experiences she says she wants. Romance is what Men perceive it to be for women.
Women do not appreciate planned, romantic gestures. I’m sure this guy thought he was being brilliant by noticing how she cuts a cupcake – “girls like it when guys pay attention to the little things, ‘other guys’ don’t listen to women, I’ll show her I’m unique,..” What most men and all women don’t understand is that the things a woman finds romantic are rarely ever planned. Your sweaty t-shirt is more romantic to her than any candlelit evening. It’s the things you don’t think would ever be romantic that stick with her. In the same way you cannot negotiate genuine desire, likewise you cannot engineer genuine romance.
The problem with planned romanticism is that it’s pregnant with an obligation to be appreciated. Men can be romantic, just not the way women say how they expect it. Like pretty much anything else women say, it’s not what they really want, but a man can’t be told what that is, he has to figure it out for himself, otherwise it isn’t genuine. For the high value Man, romance is an effortless and unthinking gesture.
August 26th, 2011 at 10:12 pm
The way you provided a concrete example and then explained it in theoretical terms made for good reading.
August 27th, 2011 at 1:55 am
Karma proposed with taco sauce as his gesture of promise. Very simple, very spontaneous, very effective. I have no doubt his speech was less than 10 words. This reminds me a quote: “A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.”
August 28th, 2011 at 11:43 pm
Rollo you are right. I never understood why i was one of those women who were not all giddy over the whole outwardly gestures of romanticism like flowers, overly dramatic clichéd gestures of affection, etc. There is no accounting for spontaneity or a man who simply does something unique as his own gesture towards you to show his affections or that he cares. A lot of women would even be content and internally excited with heavy kino (like back rubbing while we’re out) or placing his hand on your leg/thigh while driving something like that. Those simple yet affectionate romantic gestures are soo much better (and less embarrassing) than the pony shows (like in the above video). lol
August 29th, 2011 at 1:10 am
Rollo.
I need to read Jung.
September 1st, 2011 at 2:09 am
Good to see that the world is starting to catch up.
I’ve been saying this for a long time now- men are the TRUE romantic suckers. Women only respond favorably to “costly” gestures from men who have a high enough SMV to afford them.
September 2nd, 2011 at 11:04 am
Agree fully.
And this post presents the flip side of why the first few dates should be as little investment as possible. If she’s meh about you, you have lost little because you have not invested much time, money, effort or emotion.
And immediate, out-of-the-gate high investment makes a woman (other than an entitlement princess) uncomfortable because she feels obligated to respond — emotion, sex, another date. .
October 27th, 2011 at 11:43 am
[…] to doubt the veracity of what they’re telling me? Add to this that it’s men who are the true romantics of the sexes and it gets even harder to be suspect of an underlying self-serving motive. In fact it […]
October 28th, 2011 at 6:26 am
rollo go back and read the top comments on youtube. the reason she said no was because she was cheating on him with another dude behind his back and felt guilty. haha.. hopefully one day he’ll find your blog and wise up.
November 21st, 2011 at 10:40 am
[…] I’ve stated before, men are the True Romantics, women are simply the vehicles for that rarely appreciated romanticism. One of the biggest gripes […]
November 21st, 2011 at 11:10 am
[…] I’ve stated before, men are the True Romantics, women are simply the vehicles for that rarely appreciated romanticism. One of the biggest gripes […]
November 21st, 2011 at 6:58 pm
He should have asked his friends before he did that.
November 29th, 2011 at 1:25 am
I think the blogger is falling into the really common trap of saying “Men are….” “Women are…” as if all men act the same and and women act the same.
There is a bell-curve of romance within both genders and indeed the entire world’s population.
My dad writes love poems to my mom, who’s never written one to him. I dated one girl who would write love notes to me. I then dated another girl who would write notes telling me to pick my shit up off the floor or she would rip my nuts off. The two girls were very different.
The only time I ever wrote anything romantic for a girl was when she found out I was screwing another chick.
Everyone’s different.
January 3rd, 2012 at 10:00 am
[…] the girl, and acted on this resolve by buying a ring and planning to propose on V-Day. Men are the True Romantics; Women simply do not have a parallel experience for […]
January 11th, 2012 at 4:32 pm
[…] sexes. This isn’t to deny them an emotional element. Indeed I’ve described men as the true romantics, however, classically men have to a better degree than women, been the more reserved gender when it […]
February 7th, 2012 at 3:25 pm
[…] capable of attracting and maintaining. Hypergamy is above all, practical, and thus Men, the True Romantics must be pragmatists to enact their own sexual […]
April 6th, 2012 at 10:33 am
[…] an underlying emotionalism. As I’ve stated in many prior threads, it’s men who are the true romantics. We want to believe the fantasy in spite of our deductive natures telling us the opposite – and […]
September 10th, 2012 at 11:27 am
[…] and appreciated, and loved, and respected by a woman for who he is. It is men who are the real romantics, not women, but it is the grand design of hypergamy that men believe it is women who are the […]
November 23rd, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Fardo. n.
A sniglet. From the French, fardeoux.
Of or relating to the feeling of embarassment one experiences on behalf of one who is either too stupid or too ignorant to feel embarassed for himself.
November 23rd, 2012 at 4:36 pm
The sweaty T-shirt is not more romantic than a candlelit evening, it is more sexually raw. Two entirely different, but equally powerful, feelings.
Here’s a romantic video that a guy made for now wife. Notice how good looking they both are. Perhaps it only works when the couples are 8s and assortively matched.
January 5th, 2013 at 9:28 pm
Split up^^^^^^^^^
January 7th, 2013 at 10:44 am
[…] I’ve stated in many prior posts, it is Men, not women who are the True Romantics. It is actually Men who will more readily alter their lives in the most radical of ways to achieve […]
March 4th, 2013 at 8:11 pm
[…] [The True Romantics] […]
March 14th, 2013 at 7:04 pm
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but I think there’s something more fundamental at work when explaining why this was a failure.
Honestly, he comes off as pathetic the whole time. The soliloquy about them meeting in front of that place a year ago, feeling dizzy, the cupcake thing, etc., etc…it’s just irksome. But what makes it unattractive, isn’t because women don’t respond to sentimentality, it’s just that, in this case, you so obviously read FAKE through everything he says. You “can feel” that he’s just taking advice from romantic comedies to try to feign an internal substance and depth he himself lacks. And at the root of a woman’s attraction to men is POWER. If you’re incapable of expressing authentic sentiment, that is weak (just as women would also regard a tough, unsentimental man as weak when it’s clear he’s only assumed an angry, brutish demeanor because he’s insecure…(e.g. a Napoleon complex)).
But if your toughness “reads” genuine and if your sentimental gesture “reads” authentic…it isn’t unattractive because then these things reflect an underlying strength. Not weakness.
As a class, humans despise inauthenticity in others, doubtless because it reflects various inathenticities of our own. We tend to respect and admire deeply secure, and unapologetic people. And they’re quite rare.
The same mechanism is at work when a husband cleans the house hoping for sex…and it just pisses his wife off. The gesture was inauthentic, because the “begging” for sex energy behind it “reads” through. Most men would start to get a better response if they unapologetically stated their demands, and then really ‘made them genuine’ by refusing to live in a sexless marriage (by giving a serious ultimatum). Instead, many pout, give half-hearted threats, complain and stay in their unsatisfying union.. And again, what this all really distills down to is a dishonesty between the man’s thought,word and deed.
The common thought is that men are simple and women are complex. Not true. We’re all quite simple, it’s just many have difficulty in realizing this.
May 13th, 2013 at 8:31 am
[…] love is increasingly a notion bought into by young men first and foremost. Like Rollo Tomassi said, men are the true romantics. Despite the presence of pervasive myths that put romanticism in an almost exclusively female […]
May 14th, 2013 at 12:42 am
[…] […]
May 6th, 2014 at 11:03 pm
[…] I’ve stated on many occasions, it is men who are the True Romantics. Granted, it’s the unthoughtful result of centuries of evolved ‘courtly love’, […]
June 29th, 2014 at 3:39 pm
[…] why a bit more as I mature and gain experience, as well as do much reading on this subject like this post right here from my favorite blog. Women to me are the more logical of the sexes. We as men build this journey and ideology in our […]
September 29th, 2014 at 12:34 am
[…] is why I say men are the True Romantics, because the overwhelming majority will devote a lifetime to the effort of actualizing a belief in […]
November 2nd, 2014 at 10:26 pm
[…] to ONEitis both inside and outside this contrived, transactional, sort of attraction. Men are the True Romantics, they want to believe a woman’s sincerity in her Alpha deference to […]
November 23rd, 2014 at 9:54 pm
[…] the true romantics, and because of the performance demands of Hypergamy, there is a distinct want for men to believe […]
February 18th, 2015 at 3:03 pm
[…] men, we now know and understand that we are the true romantics. At some point even the most seasoned cassanova will lock a girl down if he falls for her because […]
February 18th, 2015 at 8:01 pm
[…] men, we now know and understand that we are the true romantics. At some point even the most seasoned cassanova will lock a girl down if he falls for her because […]
March 1st, 2015 at 8:23 pm
[…] for a moment that any man is functionally indifferent to the influence of women. Men are the True Romantics; we want our idealistic impression of love to be impossibly reciprocated. We look for ways to […]
March 20th, 2015 at 5:29 pm
[…] etc. These are old books ideals, and the main reason I’ve always asserted that men are the True Romantics is due exactly to this […]
May 28th, 2015 at 8:33 am
‘cinnabon lady said she’d marry him’ LOL
June 12th, 2015 at 6:57 pm
[…] “gaming” years and begin to feel a want for something more substantial. Men are the true romantics of the sexes so it’s no great surprise that their romantic / idealistic concept of love would […]
June 23rd, 2015 at 8:13 pm
Women are not romantic, they are only the arbiters of romance
June 25th, 2015 at 7:01 pm
[…] then, if you asked me what I was up to, I might have claimed that I was a helpless romantic — and how can you judge that? If I was really cornered, I might have argued that I was a […]
August 3rd, 2015 at 1:00 am
[…] to still be all things, the mythical Good Guy balance, to his wife. There’s something in men’s romantic natures that wants this to work for themselves and in spite of women who fundamentally lack the capacity […]
December 14th, 2015 at 1:30 pm
[…] in “The True Romantics” he says: “Women do not appreciate planned, romantic gestures.” planned here may also equated to […]
January 18th, 2016 at 3:16 pm
[…] men. The Feminine Imperative figured that out a hundred thousand years ago – men are the True Romantics, and that’s been their thumbscrew for […]
March 10th, 2016 at 3:55 am
It’s exactly this: The problem with planned romanticism is that it’s pregnant with an obligation to be appreciated.
It feels manipulative.
July 12th, 2016 at 1:36 pm
[…] (Enlace al original en Ingles) […]