Dear ‘The Man’, How can I inspire my man to become more romantic… I might not be the most romantic partner in the world, but I do often suggest romantic dinners for TWO, long walks on the waterfront, or buy him little presents now and again. But, he’s the kind of guy who invites his friends to the dinner, thinks a walk along the beach is a waste of surfing time and that taking out the garbage should suffice as an expression of love.
I’m getting envious of my girlfriends who get wooed with flowers and jewellery or spontaneous dinners in places that require a little more dressing up than McD’s drive through.

Help!
Frustrated romanticist

Dear Fromanticist,
 
I can see it now… It’s a Sunday afternoon, just at that time when the sun is dimming and turning pink and orange with the promise of evening.  You're sitting on the porch, a glass of wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, staring out in thought in that pleasantly listless kind of tired that happens at the end of the weekend.  You're content with your life, things are going fairly well - good friends, okay job (most days), and you're living in a nice place (nothing flash, of course, but not too shabby either.)

All of a sudden a sensation starts building up way down in your chest.  It’s probably only the wine talking, maybe the remnants of a hangover from the night before, mingling with the bittersweet notion of work the next morning.  Nonetheless, it’s a strange, seemingly contradictory feeling.  You're suddenly blindsided with the realisation of how much life you have inside you, how much you want and how much you have to give.  You have a good life, but that orangey-pink sunset is whispering dangerous things to you, things you haven't thought about in some time.  Fantasies of passionate, but ill-fated love affairs with dark-eyed musicians in Paris and tanned-skin surfer boys in Bali.  You're suddenly reminded of what a huge world it is, and how deep your thoughts and feelings run. You're reminded that you're built not for a life of paycheques and DVD rentals, but for a life of intensity and love and daring and romance.

So you turn around to share all of this with your lover, and you see him in the front room, lying on the couch with his hand down his unbuttoned jeans, half-asleep in front of Top Gear reruns, and you realise that the hugeness of your lust for life will have to stay buried inside you for another week at least.

Sigh.

Okay, I'm being dramatic, but that's what we're talking about here right - drama, romance, passion?  These intangible things that were promised to us by a million movies and books and songs when we were growing up.  And maybe we're not talking about sordid love-making in the long grass next to a lake in the French countryside with a local villager who can't speak our language.  Maybe we're just talking about a nice night out. A walk down by the waterfront every once and a while.  Or just even a single night when the TV is replaced with music, the Steinlager is replaced with a good Pinot, and the endless chatter about annoying coworkers and arsehole bosses is replaced with eye-gazing and softly spoken secrets.

The problem here is that not all men are expressive at the best of times, so to expect to be drinking wine from each others lips on a sunset beach might be a bit of a leap for your dormant Romeo.  You may also have to come to terms with the fact that we don't exactly live in the most romantic of cultures: New Zealanders as a whole pride themselves on the art of emotional reservedness.  We come from generations before us for whom the pinnacle of the seductive lure might have not so much love letters as invites to the local RSA do, signed off not with declarations of eternal longing but with "Ladies, a plate."
 
However, life without romance is like coffee without the caffeine or sex without the spanking: it’s all well and good, but what's the point?