The Modern Romantic
By Randy Steinberg
The true conquest in love-making is possessing the desired’s will.
-Michel de Montaigne
Writing in the sixteenth century in a time of great turbulence in France, the great essayist (perhaps the first essayist) Montaigne articulated the veritable essence of romance. Only a time of civil strife could evoke such a proclamation, I believe. Necessity is the mother of invention, and Western Europe, at the time, lying between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance desperately needed a romantic ideal with which to propel it forward and to secure it safely from benightment.
 Nearly five hundred years later, the spirit that Montaigne articulated lies on the brink of extinction. What passes for romance [love-making] today is a chimera of Montaigne’s pronouncement. Let there be no confusion about Montaigne’s definition of love-making and romance: they amount to the same thing, for the end goal of romance is love-making and through the act, possession. To be certain, love-making and possession are daily occurrences, but it is the process which lacks integrity, and we can all be sure that beginnings and endings are less important and far less mysterious and variegated than processes. Humanity is more willful as well as disingenuous at present, and the concept that Montainge expressed is only to be seen in peculiar places and at best ephemerally.
The modern romantic is a misnomer, a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron.
The modern romantic is not such. The modern romantic is poison to the life blood of romance. The modern romantic is the worst kind of romantic: the modern romantic is one who believes himself or herself romantic when she or he is in fact not. I can think of nothing more stultifying, nothing so crippling to the intent of romance in humankind’s purview than the modern romantic’s tight grasp on the quackery and the falseness of its unrealized, unwitting belief in some so called “romantic” notions. Nostrums more accurately for a diseased host.
Romance today languishes in the ownership of hacks, soothe-sayers, and snake oil salesmen. They traffic –with gullible consumers lining up- in the trade of silly behavior and trite actions. They are unaware of the harm they cause romance. It is neither a buyer’s nor a seller’s market. Both patron and proprietor are equally responsible, and both parties to the contract are oblivious to the depth of the wound they have inflicted.
Today romance passes for flowers and candy. A man can win a woman’s heart by publicly embarrassing himself by engaging in clown-like behavior. He trucks in these antics because he is assured that his actions will be ultimately validated as charming, as “romantic”. He is a romantic at heart, the people will say. She blushes and cries as he gets down on a knee and sings a song of love. “How frightfully romantic!” the murmur will go through a crowd. And woman will reward the buffoon for his efforts not by giving him her will but by bestowing upon her prince affection. There is a difference.
People cry out for romance as if it were the bread necessary to feed their starving souls. They want more; they feel a lack of it in their lives. When they say they want romance, they are looking for a candle lit dinner, a walk on the beach with the waves lapping against ankles and around toes, a moonlight stroll, a glass of wine by the fire place, and a sunset on a balmy night. In short, they want greeting card scenarios, so bland and so identifiable that they surely cannot pass for the mystery of romance. They want what commercial enterprise wishes romance to be- a controlled commodity, easily packaged, distributed, and advertised. But not even they are fully cognizant of their malfeasance.
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