What is Romance?

What is this romance, this blessed thing called love, before which the world seems to kneel in awe? What makes a person so special and so irreplaceable in our lives that we fear first for them then for ourselves? This elusive feeling, that amazing makes the world goes round, has been a mystery for me all my life. If one was to understand what romance is, it would take him an eternity to do so. But just for fun, let’s try it here.

If you were to try and go by the definition our favorite Hollywood classics have given it, you would be less than happy with this cheesy little description:  guy finding girl, dancing in the rain love! But then again, love makes the most mature and poised of us do wonderfully silly stuff: the really big, ‘pretend to like his/her taste in music, let him/her eat the last piece of cheesecake, hold a radio over your head outside their window’ love!

If you were to ‘thesaurus’ romance, the synonyms would be something like: story, anecdote, fiction, saga, you get the drift right? This magical feeling of love, is defined as something out of a story book? Well, yes. It is, isn’t it? When you are in love, you do become the princess of your little dream land, and he is the knight in shining armor, who makes you smile when you are sad, who opens bottle lids for you with his strong arms, and who gladly chases the mice out of your room. He is the everyday urban.

White prince, with a dashing smile, and a can-do-anything-for-my-damsel attitude! We all do knit little fables of sorts for ourselves don’t we? And this is culminated (most often) in the wedding ceremony of your dreams, where every girl and guy gets to be the centre of everyone’s attention and worlds. So yes, in a way romance is very much like a lovely saga of two hearts, meeting and falling inexplicably in love.

To me, romance would be defined how one of my English teachers had put romanticism as: as passion, adventure and excitement. At the time we were defining what romantic heroes meant. That is what love and romance is to me, to be passionate about someone, to be adventurous for them, with them, and to be eternally thankful for their presence.