Remember once upon a time, if someone asked you out on a date, it consisted of dinner and a movie? Or maybe even a sporting event or a concert? The date would end with a simple peck on the lips and a smile, sometimes followed by a sweet phone call later in the evening.  You may have even been lucky enough to receive flowers.

Those were the good ole’ days I suppose. I don’t know what’s going on now. You go out with someone one time and they expect to go back to your place and get it on – and they have the nerve to be disappointed if it doesn’t happen.  Or they want it BEFORE you even go out. Everyone is in such a hurry. There’s no real courting, no “getting to know one another”.  And the better the date, the more pressure you feel to have sex with that person when the date ends. Why?  What happened?

It seems that overall; the world has given up on romance. There’s very little romance in television and movies, and almost none in music.  Your typical romantic comedy often has the main characters in bed by the first date, if they managed to wait that long.  And your typical romantic song is more about the step by step instructions of what someone is planning to do to you in the bedroom , not any of the sweet things that led up to that moment.

I think for the most part, romance resides in our heads, especially in the heads of women. The whole concept of a man showing up at our door step, flowers in hand, with a beautifully planned evening designed especially for us, seems more like a fairytale than something we should actually be waiting for.  This isn’t a pessimistic view, just a realistic one.

So how can it be fixed? We can make all the requests that we want: Please take me out, let’s do something together, let’s try something new; but at some point we have to accept that the person we want just may not be interested in that. Maybe it’s time to move on.

We live in a liberated world. People know what they want. If you don’t want to give it to them, they move on to the next one. All of us hopeless romantics need to do the same. We don’t have to give up on our fantasy and conform to this no-dating sex only society.  We need to just keep moving on to the next person if we aren’t getting what we desire. There really are still people out there like us. Maybe in the future we all need to move to Fantasy Island, but for now, we are still here. We are just having a really hard time running into one another.  There are still women who want to walk through the park holding hands or bury their face in their date’s arms during a scary movie. And there are still men who want to open the door for their lady and want to meet her parents. All those sweet things of the past.

Justin Timberlake brought sexy back, so VL on the DL is bringing romance back.  Who’s with me?

VL on the DL