To this day, when we talk about romance and beautiful, sublime love, we often remember the Renaissance, gallant chevaliers, ready to cross swords for the honor of the Beautiful Lady, performing serenades under the balcony of the mistress of their heart…
Stop! Stop, stop stop! So we really think that putting a foot of iron into another person’s belly just to impress our crush is that damn romantic? Or throwing stones at the windows of a sleeping girl so that she, sleep-deprived and angry, will listen to us in a bad voice yelling a poorly rhymed song about unearthly love – is that beautiful? It turns out, as this viral thread in the AskReddit community confirms, there are lots of outdated “romantic” techniques.
More info: Reddit
Courtship that relies on being overly persistent.
It used to be cute to hear stories of “When I first met her she wanted nothing to do with me. I showed up to her job with flowers every day until she said yes and we eventually fell in love!” ❤️
Nowadays, that’s just straight up harassment.
Semi-related.
I went out with a girl, and I would get out and open the door for her when we went out in my car. After about the second day, she complimented me on being such a gentleman and that no one has done that for her.
I laughed, then I told her I forgot to tell her the inside door handle on the passenger side car was broken, so that’s the only way to open the door.
Well, anyway, it worked I guess. I’ve been married to her for 12 years and she’s the mother of my two kids.
Okay, let’s remember one of the most romantic stories of the Middle Ages about the unearthly and unrequited love of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri for the young and beautiful Beatrice, to whom he dedicated many sonnets and poems. Now let’s get a little dry reality: Dante was 19 years old when he first saw 8-year-old Beatrice, but many years later she married another man.
Dante’s great and unrequited feeling did not prevent him from marrying another woman, who bore him three kids. However, in none – you hear, in none of his works does Dante mention the name of his wife Gemma, while Beatrice, who by that time had already passed away (yes, mortality was sky-high in the insanely romantic Middle Ages), remained on the pages of his poems until the last years of his life.
When my dad started pursuing my mom at the college that they met at, he went to the records office and got her schedule (apparently anyone could do that at the time) and waited outside of each of her classrooms to walk her to her next class. He did this for like a week. She thought it was both slightly annoying and romantic.
Now we’ll have a time skip and go to not so long ago – about forty or thirty years. How many times have we been presented with some story as proof of incredible love about how a guy was rejected by a girl more than once or twice, but continued to literally pursue her – until he finally achieved reciprocity? Or about how a lover secretly found out the place of work of the subject of his passion in order to regularly get in their way… Now this sounds a bit creepy, doesn’t it?
The entirety of the movie “The Notebook” 🤷♂️ just in how he gets his first date at the start of it ” Go out with me or I’ll lay in traffic until I die” it all goes downhill from there.
“Of course, each time has its own viewpoints, and what was completely acceptable a couple of centuries or even a couple of decades ago, today we consider absolutely strange or even creepy,” says Irina Matveeva, a psychologist and certified NLP specialist, whom Bored Panda asked for a comment here. “The evolution of our views is no less impressive than technological progress.”
“We shouldn’t forget that morality in the old days was completely different and, for example, any European noblewoman of the Renaissance would have ceased to respect herself if she hadn’t had a couple of no less noble admirers who would have fought a duel for her attention. This was the unspoken etiquette of that time. Today it seems strange to us, but… well, maybe in a hundred years our habit of sticking to TikTok will look just as weird…” Irina presumes.
Knowing them since they were a kid but you weren’t, like my grandad met my nan when she was 13 and he was 20, they waited til she was old enough but that’s still gross to me, like you’re just sat waiting for the child you love to be legal.
I was led by old films to believe that romance would involve a lot more slapping men in the face and throwing drinks at them than it actually does.
Well, if you somehow find yourself in any of the stories presented in this list, you shouldn’t do an instant facepalm. In any case, critical thinking and a sense of humor will allow you to distinguish what’s truly romantic from what only seems so. And now, our dear readers, please feel free to scroll this list to the very end and, who knows, maybe add your own ideas and tales in the comments below.
My paternal grandparents were Italian immigrants coming separately through Ellis Island as kids around 1910. They settled in an Italian community near Philadelphia. As family lore has it, my grandfather “kidnapped” my grandmother and kept her out over night. After that, they had to get married.
My dad went on three dates with my mom during basic training. Then proposed to her over the phone from Germany. Flew back to TX, got married, and took her to Germany (she’d never left south TX before). 63 years and still going.
Being announced at a wedding as Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. That used to be a thing and I always cringed because it felt like the bride was completely giving up her identity.
Also, a woman sitting in the car after you park waiting for you to walk around and open her door.
The Japanese old way of proposing which basically translates to, “Will you make me miso soup every morning, fore the rest of our lives?”.
A matador fighting a bull, killing it, cutting it’s ear off, and then presenting it (or a bloody handkerchief) to a woman.
There was a story we used to have to read in school that included a matador fight and this happened. Most of the girls just cried the bull [died].
Sending unsolicited love letters or showing up unannounced at someone’s home
However, in today’s society, these actions could be perceived as intrusive or even creepy.
My dad followed my mom across the country. She was doing an internship where he worked and when it was over she had to go back home to Texas. They weren’t dating or anything, she had a boyfriend at the time. But my dad said he couldn’t let her get away so he jumped in his s****y car and drove to Texas.
Intentionally dropping a handkerchief and then someone running up to pick it up and return it to the owner. That was still a thing when I was a child.
My dad tried to hit on my mom by asking her a mussel recipe (which in french is very disturbing because mussel/moule is one way of saying vagina). Never understood how they went to have 3 children together.
