I've been wondering what the answer to this question was for most of my adult life. I've never been what you'd call romantic, but like Forest Gump "I know what love is". For me "stupid is as stupid does" seems oddly relevant too, Thank you Forest. I think a lack of Romantic Love in my relationship helped lead to the end of it. Romance has been so far removed from my marriage for so long that defining it is very difficult for me. I gave up on romance and romantic love soon after my ex gave up on our relationship. I think I knew then that it was over, but I was unwilling to admit it. I held on for so many years and hoped upon hope that we'd be able to work things out and somehow find that spark that we'd lost so long ago. I guess I'm a bit more romantic than I thought after all.

I looked up Romantic Love on the Internet and Wikipedia defines romantic love as an ineffable feeling of intense attraction shared in passionate or intimate attraction and intimate interpersonal and sexual relationships. What a crock of shit... Romantic love is different for everyone and not something that can be so easily and generally defined.

Romantic Love to me is more unconditional than passionate, but passion does play a large part of it. Romantic Love, like any other kind of love, is defined by the people involved. What is romance in a dead relationship anyway? A painful reminder of how bad things really are and how far from true love you've fallen.

Romantic Love should be spontaneous, caring, thoughtful, loving, truthful, nonjudgmental, committed, involved, intimate, passionate, and of course sexual and sensual, but only if both parties are equally invested in the relationship. Romantic love is something that can change the way you feel about life and about how you want to live it. When found it can help redefine you and help change you into something more than you were before without loosing yourself in the process.

OK so now I'm doing it. I'm trying to define an inexpressible term. Romantic Love is a myth, a fable, a fairytale. It's only real if you truly believe in it. And unfortunately, it doesn't exist when you don't. It's like looking for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. It's out there if you believe it to be but may not be what you expect when you find it.

I learned long ago that it's the journey that counts in everything we do. Finding Romantic Love is no different. Romantic Love is the silver lining that can hopefully be found when two people open themselves up enough and look at the cloud together. Romantic Love is invisible to most people until they're willing to risk loosing everything to find it. Unfortunately, it's been hidden from so many of us for song long we stop believing in it or forget that exists altogether.

Sometimes late a night when I'm half asleep and thinking about my new life and how I hope to spend it moving forward, I feel a small glimmer of hope that I'll find it again. Not that I'm sure I had ever really found it to begin with. I do feel optimistic during these times and believe, if only for a minute, that it's out there and something we can all find. Maybe it's not as allusive as I think and maybe, just maybe it's out there for all of us. Only time will tell.

-- Brett