Romance to women is payday for living graciously important lives on behalf of their man. Romance to men is pre-conquest attention and what leads up to and includes foreplay. The gap is huge and requires relationship experts to close it. Although not instinctive to men, women can make it intuitive to them.
Not needful of romance, men don’t easily comprehend the criticality of it in their lives. Even worse, they have great difficulty making sense of it. Thus, men routinely leave women adrift in a sea of puzzlement, anxiety, and doubt about the worthiness of their man.
So, in reality, the male’s shortcoming about romance brings out each woman’s need to improve her man, which is the same as putting the hook of marriage in her mouth. As a man shines brightly as marital candidate, his shortcoming as a romancer makes him even more eligible. She invites herself to change him after the altar. Tsk Tsk! Far better to teach him before conquest.
Men are not eager to participate in romance. They take or find various exceptions:
- Men suspect they should but can’t master the art sufficiently well to meet female expectations. They can see that certain things make their woman feel romanced. They pick up bits and pieces of the art from other women. But they also pick up the lack of conviction to practice it routinely or steadfastly. They feel guilty for awhile and then forget it.
- Womanly viewed romance includes the willing exchange of feelings. Just the event thrills women but not men. They have all manner of reasons for not exposing their feelings. The most influential being that they are born that way. Another is that disclosure makes them competitively weaker, which goes against their primal nature.
- Men dodge romance partially because women push them where they are not ready to go. As women participate, they seem to suck men into faster relationship development than men like. Scary resistance sets in as women try to get commitment before a guy is ready for it. Thus, romancing a woman can become a virtual trap or opportunity to fail or both.
- Her romantic impatience pressures him to change into her model of what a romancer should be or do. Not being inclined to feel guilty about emotional matters, men simply forget to try very hard.
- In this day and age, the road to frequent and convenient sex elsewhere is too easy to waste time on female-expected romance. (Dating is virtually extinct on college campuses, and men are the cause but not responsible.)
- Even if they do romance a woman, they feel vulnerable to being compared to other guys with other women, much like performance in bed. That’s a threat to their competitive reputation with men, which threatens their sense of significance. So, they just try to get by with the minimum of whatever is required to bed her.
- Because they lack sufficient skill, soft-heartedness, and perceptiveness about romancing women well, men see little opportunity to earn self-admiration.
- Romancing a woman does not make a man love her more. More devoted to her, yes. But giving or receiving romance plays but a very minor role in his love. His love is based on respect for who she is and what she does plus her likeability to have and be around. Likeability being based on her attractiveness in his eyes and what comes out of her mouth.
Men don’t inherit romantic skills at birth. Women, however, have all the reasons for men to initiate romance, and so they blame men. Blame makes it worse; it excuses women from responsibility for how men treat them. If men don’t know how, why, or when romance is expected, how do they learn? They need to be taught.
Just the term romance reminds men of foreplay and what it leads to. Of course a few other passing signs of attention and affection are necessary to gain a woman’s acceptance. But for the most part, the lead up to and foreplay are a guy’s notion of romance—including husbands of many years.
Many, many men are romantic at heart. Yet, except for greater willingness to try to do right things by women, they haven’t much incentive to express romance. They might embarrass themselves. They might be in the wrong about a woman’s willingness to accept their fumbling for proper words. They are naturally resistant to expose themselves, because it can be used against them and threaten their role as dominant member of a couple. They are even more resistant if women in their culture are typically critical or mean-spirited.
The romantic-at-heart man has many female-friendly traits and habits. Generally, women adore him for it. He has learned the enjoyment of masculine soft-heartedness, which reduces the hard-headedness among females he deals with. He teases young girls and it brings out their prettiness and confirms their importance to themselves. He is sensitive to female sensibilities, eager to find attractiveness in others, appreciates loveliness in natural things, honors her modesty as priceless trait, and proves himself friendly toward others. Mean-spiritedness is either lacking or suppressed among women he deals with.
In the end, the more alpha the male, the less willing to share his innermost feelings. Romantic-at-heart alpha men depend on their actions rather than their words to convey their devotion. Immortalized by Hollywood’s western heroes of yesteryear. Alpha non-romantics specifically hide their feelings behind facades that make body language practically unreadable. They use their hard-headed nature to suppress any soft-heartedness that may creep into their thoughts. Their women can expect romance to mean foreplay, period.
However and forever, the romantic man is still an ardent member of the male gender and fits in with the others. Generally, he also is super-reluctant to expose personal feelings for many manly reasons. 1) He refuses until and except as he detects a woman’s willingness to not laugh, reject, or disdain what he has to say about his deeper feelings. 2) His competitive nature says don’t reveal his full hand to competitors, and each woman is a competitor until conquered by him personally. 3) Even after conquest, to expose his feelings reflects weakness and makes him vulnerable. It lasts until his woman breathes sufficient cooperation into their lives and it converts his spirit from competition to harmonizing with her. 4) His dominant nature says don’t enable a mate to interfere with his dominance, and women have been known to try when they are aware of his deeper feelings. Women are also known to use all the leverage they can muster from receiving new information. In fact, it’s a constant urge residing in each woman’s heart; she can improve him. To do so, of course, is to tamper with his sense of both dominance and significance.
Concluding, men have natural and learned tendencies to not be eager and perhaps even avoid being romantic as visualized in female dreams and expectations. It confirms men as immovable but subject to ever present irresistible force by females. It never ends. She wants better pay for her graciously important life and expects it in romance dollars. His romance earning power is often so poor that he qualifies for under-employed romance insurance, which women provide out of their soft-heartedness, self-gratitude, and patient hope for better romancing ahead.
What Women Never Hear 