What It Means to Be a Romantic
I have seen how people who outwardly portray themselves as “hopeless romantics” turn and run from real romance when it shows up in their lives. They prefer a simplified fairy tale version of this powerful interhuman force. They are as children playing dress-up compared to real adults who embrace their adult responsibilities. They are geeks cosplaying as their favorite comic book characters—LARPers who have lost sight of what they are supposed to be role-playing.
Real romance is indulging in the primordial drive toward romantic love, which exists within all of us to some degree. Love is shared identification with another. It comes in many familiar forms. Parents love their children to the point that their survival instincts extend to protect them, above even themselves. Friends and comrades bond over mutual support, pastimes, and ideological values. But romantics seek to merge both ego and physical being with the one they love. It is like a natural chemical reaction that automatically occurs when they are near whomever they are romantically compatible with.
The extreme end of this natural compatibility is the ever-elusive, much-fabled “soulmate.” One could interpret this phenomenon through a metaphysical lens to mean the one-and-only great love that two people are predestined for by God (or Whoever pulls the strings). But a naturalistic explanation works fine, too. Soulmates are simply people who have the rarest, highest capacity for romantic bonding as a result of their shared and complementary nature. But that they will find one another and put the work and growth into making their destined relationship work is not a foregone conclusion. Both of them must fully embrace their nature as romantics and seek the highest form of self-expression, which they know is found in one another.
To be a romantic is to be more sensitive to the bonding mechanisms between compatible lovers. It becomes an overlay for your experience of the world. I’m still not sure exactly what causes it, but I suspect it is related to a sense that your life, your ability to live out your identity to the fullest, is incomplete so long as it is missing the influence of the feminine (if you are masculine) or the masculine (if you are feminine). While non-romantics can casually ignore the half they are missing, we romantics cannot. Hungry creatures are impelled to find food. Those in the cold and dark await the coming sun or huddle around the fire for vital warmth.
Romantic people are those who recognize that there is a better, upgraded version of themselves, their fundamental potential, waiting for them when they bond with just the right person—and that the same divine luxury awaits the right person they bond with. A romantic man is chronically burdened, and he cannot remove the burden on his own, no matter how smart or capable he pushes himself to become. He needs her. He needs the influence that he finds only in her.