The True Story of Romantic Love, American Exceptionalism, and the End of Western Civilization

 We invented romantic love.

Sorry. Let me be clear. Romantic love is a Christian conception. To be more depressingly specific for you WOKE youngsters, romantic love was fabricated out of essentially nowhere by white men.

You’re well within your rights in this post-post modern era to say that 500 years of romantic love was just bullshit, well replaced by hooking up for just fucking. Within your rights, I said. But what does that leave you with? Rap songs about ho’s and, well, just fucking. Which makes women what? Think about that for a second. If they’re not worth anything more than fucking and making you a baby daddy for the nth time, what are they good for? Uh, nothing.

It can’t have escaped your attention that men and women choosing their own mates is still a minority situation in the WOKE world you prefer to ours. India, China, Japan, Korea, the muslim nations, now including Afghanisand (what’s that, 4 billion all told?), women who don’t get a choice of who they marry. It’s all arranged. You and the girlfriend you can’t quite commit to and can’t quite let go of are in an increasingly tiny minority.

Right here, right now, I’m going to be putting together some men and women representing different perspectives on the thing we call romantic love. What all movies, books, plays, etc, are based on. Who cares more, more deeply about the phenomenon of what the French first called “courtly love” in the 11th and 12th centuries than men? It’s even possible to make the case that the majority of the world is right: women don’t fall in love with men. They make a deal in return for children and security.

Me? Not actually buying it. I refuse to believe that all women are complicit in being made sex slaves to ugly husbands. But I refuse to believe a lot of things. Like I refuse to believe the top graduates of the nation’s most famous universities actually chose to elect a halfwit from the bottom end of the Delaware Law School president of the United States. And he’s senile besides. I despised him when he had all three of his marbles. Said so in print when you could say things in print. To me, the most unbelievable fact of the 2020 election is Alan Dershowitz’s insistence that he voted enthusiastically for Biden. Now I know he’s a liar. Don’t like that knowledge. Thought there for a time that he might still be a man I could trust, after a lifetime of being crushingly disappointed by Harvard crap.

So,it falls to me alone to make the case for White Men, who at my age are the last gentlemen on earth. The rest of you, the ones who are buying and perpetuating the propaganda, are not ladies. And never will be.

I’m going to make my case with music. Trying to be fair. You’re welcome to make a counter case. But who’s really in love here. And who’s settling for, well, property rights? Which is not to say anybody is really prostituting herself,

It’s called motive.

But she still loves him kinda. “He’s mine.” I know, BLM and all that. Not what I’m talking about. Later on you’ll be seeing Billie Holiday and a white man expressing themselves from different gender perspectives. Now, though, we’re”going to hear”from the romantic male of the species.

Safe to say, he’s in love. More on this dichotomy later. Now, though, think you’ll agree they’re both pretty good at expressing the finer emotions. Closing on women, though.  If you ask them to name the greatest romantic novel written by a female, they’ll all say Wuthering Heights or Gone with the Wind. When you ask for a poem, this is the one they all know:

Ask the men. Too many to pick from. Honest to God. Dollars to donuts, though, they know this chestnut they read in middle school is better than Browning.

Romeo in love

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick and pale with grief,

That thou her maid art far more fair than she:

Be not her maid, since she is envious;

Her vestal livery is but sick and green

And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.

It is my lady, O, it is my love!

O, that she knew she were!

She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that?

Her eye discourses; I will answer it.

I am too bold, 'tis not to me she speaks:

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,

Having some business, do entreat her eyes

To twinkle in their spheres till they return.

What if her eyes were there, they in her head?

The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,

As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven

Would through the airy region stream so bright

That birds would sing and think it were not night.

See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!

O, that I were a glove upon that hand,

That I might touch that cheek!

Back to music. There’s that big moment when you realize you’re in love Big Time. Try these guys. Who’s playing it cool and who’s overflowing with passion? More importantly, who do you believe?

She’s dead and I’m still in love with her. Waddya want?

Mark Steyn wrote a 1,200 word essay about how impossible 

this song is to sing — key changes, chord chatzchkas, all that 

jazz — but word is, Frank did it in one take. I call that love.

Did you know there are lots of women who try to sing, and perform otherwise on Broadway because they’re so famous we have to love them? Try Elizabeth Taylor for one.

Somebody lost Elizabeth. Who?

She ran away from Watertown. Never came back once in the whole album

See, I’m thinking men suffer more. From this romance thing. Two piquant examples.

He’s hurting.

She’s really not.

The next couple really did love another. Nobody said romantic love was a panacea. Just an outstandingly beautiful feature of western civilization. But it can be tragic. Like everything else in life.

He was supposed to be the Frank Sinatra of country 

music. Recorded this and then  killed himself. Sad.

She misses him. A lot. But this song somehow reminds me of…

Kind of just looking back. He’s thinking of women. 

She’s thinking of outfits. 

Just three more. What Frank would really have sung when he lost the love of his life. Like I’ve listened a couple of times. 

And I’ll close with two who should have been lovers, time travel notwithstanding…

Billie Holiday 1944

And the soulmate she never got to meet.

Roy Orbison 1980. Billie would have loved him.

 

Even if we’re losing on the world stage right now, we still win. We’re Americans. Everybody everywhere else in the world wears our jeans, listens to our music, copies our movies and TV shows, and uses all our curse words. No matter how much they hate us, they all want to be us. Because who among them can be? Guess that makes us the vulgar 21st Century Romans of an empire nobody will ever forget.

P.S. If you love your wife, you owe a debt of great gratitude to white men who lived a thousand years ago. Pretty sure you don’t have a rebuttal of the point or an equivalent example of cultural appropriation to cite.  Want a song? Me too.

I didn’t actually propose to her. I had a virtual romance that enabled me to take out the trash in those days and look after a deerhound and his greyhound friends. Is that a romance? Well, it’s certainly nothing anybody arranged.

OOPS. My wife just discovered this post and said I was full of shit. Both sexes invented romantic love, according to her. (Right.) She reminded me that I read all four volumes of Dumas’s Vicomte de Bragelonne as if I were watching General Hospital, which is about, what else, romantic love entanglements. She reminded me of this song and I remembered it like a shiv in the gut. Loved that woman. Wanted some one of them to say the same thing to me one day. Which is when I saw Pat tapping her foot. Okay. I can tell tales too. The first time I ever saw her face, I wanted to jump her. That red lion’s mane, those tight pants, that scathingly scornful smile, those gimlet eyes. Scotsman’s Delight. Only took us twenty years to get there, but the emotion was the same.

Romantic love. It’s an American thing. So get out of our face. Kiss her and quit snarking at us.