Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
As girls, we all grow up with the ideal type of partner in mind. The person that meets our criteria and we know is going to make us happy-ever-after.
As time goes by, we go from idealist teenager to realist adult; we finally have to come to terms with the fact that there is no such thing as the perfect man and that if we want to live happy-enough-ever-after we need to compromise and let go of some of those ideals. Some aspects are less important than others and some very good men that might be lacking in one or two of the things we really want in a man may make up for them in ways we never knew we needed until they came along.
Everyone is different and we all have some things we can’t or won’t compromise about and for me that one thing is romance. Unfortunately in this day and age it seems to be a difficult thing to find. More and more of my girlfriends and I are noticing that men and romance don’t get along very well. A friend of mine, Caroline Fergus, says: “There was this guy that was hounding me for ages to go out with him on a date. He was a great laugh and I enjoyed being around him but I was never interested in anything other than being friends. Anyway, after a while he got the picture and stopped asking me out but a few months later we were at a wedding and he’d had a few drinks. He came and sat down next to me — with my date sitting on the other side of me — and looked me in the eye. ‘You really missed out you know’ he said, ‘I would have spoiled you and taken you out for curry and beer’.” Needless to say Caroline wasn’t bowled over by what she’d missed out on.
But why is it that so many men don’t feel the need to make an effort to show a woman how he feels about her? Tom Weddle has been married to his wife Lisa for six years. “To be honest, at the end of a long day at work I’m too tired to pick up flowers on the way home and go through the whole candlelit courtship thing,” says Tom, “after all these years she should know I love her. Why would I still be coming home to her night after night if I didn’t?” Err, OK. Our illustrious editor Dean Williams agrees: “I think romance is a waste of time,” he says, “no one really expects it anymore. It isn’t sincere and when a man does something romantic it’s only really to speed up the path to the bedroom or because he’s done something wrong.”
It seems though that not all men have parted ways with romance, some just don’t know how to express themselves. “I know that my girlfriend is starting to lose patience with the fact that I’m never romantic and it’s not that I don’t want to, I just don’t know where to start. Flowers and chocolates seem so corny and unimaginative and it seems that every idea I come up with appears in a movie we watch before I have the chance to carry it out and I don’t want to look like I’m just copying what I see,” says Simon Grey. “It’s a lose-lose situation so in the end I don’t bother and my girlfriend ends up even more disappointed.”
When I talk about not being prepared to compromise romantically, I’m not talking about the mushy-pass-me-a bucket kind, I’m talking about the thoughtful kind. Case in point: I used to go out with this guy who was as manly as can be (he used to play with bombs for a living) but still managed to be caring and romantic without making me cringe from the soppiness of it all. Soon after we met he overheard me talking to some of my girlie friends about how sunflowers were my favourite type of flower. I had no idea he was even within earshot, but a couple of weeks later I went to pick him up from his compound and just as we were driving off he told me he’d forgotten something.
I stopped and he jumped out of the car, ran across the road and jumped into his neighbour’s garden. Seconds later he was back over the fence with a sunflower and a huge smile on his face. “Your favourite!” He said as he got back in the car and gave me the flower. I burst out laughing the second I saw it because out of a garden full of beautiful sunflowers in bloom, in his rush to get out of the neighbour’s garden without being seen he’d managed to grab the one dried up, frazzled, crusty-petaled dead flower of the whole bunch. It was one of the most romantic things anyone has ever done for me.
The fact of the matter is that despite the flower being dead, it was the thoughtfulness behind the action that counted, add to that the shear comedy of the situation and it will forever be one of my favourite memories.
Another lovely example comes from one of my friend back in England. When her fiancé proposed to her, they had just been out for a lazy afternoon at the pub with some friends. After a while he told her he wasn’t feeling well but insisted he’d go home alone and that she should just stay and have fun with their friends. Although she wasn’t happy about letting him go home without her when he wasn’t feeling well, he seemed pretty adamant he wanted to be alone so she stayed behind. After an hour she decided to go home and check on him and walked in the door to a darkened hallway.
There were little tea candles lighting her way to the back garden and when she got outside he had used candles to spell out the words Will U Marry Me? “I was totally stunned, David has never been the romantic type and it always kind of upset me, but that was such a lovely way to propose that he’s stored up romance brownie points for a long time to come,” she said.
So there you have it lads. You don’t need to be mushy and you don’t need to be frequent, but every now and again blowing her mind away with a thoughtful romantic gesture could stand you in good stead for a long long time! A little imagination is all it takes and if you love her, she worth it.
