It’s so difficult! It’s like everybody out there is trying to get me for having faith in love and relationships. Hey fam, it’s not my fault that my parents set such high standards for me in the romance department, okay? How am I supposed to settle for anything less than the typical rom-com ‘real deal’ after listening to my parents’ stories about how they fell in love growing up?
So far I’ve been called ‘stupid’, ‘delusional’, ‘unrealistic’, ‘sappy’, ‘hopeless’ and several other words, all implying that I am a fool for believing in love. But I can’t really blame these people for saying that to me because that’s the kind of age we live in today. I’m just going to go ahead and call it the Age of Cynics because, at this rate, the only old-school and proper romance etiquette any of us are going to get to see is in badly-written rom-com movies.
I’m only saying this because I find a lot of people practically swooning over the ‘wholesome’ behaviour of their significant others, which is actually just how people should expect to be treated in a relationship, romantic or otherwise. I think a lot of us have forgotten the importance of the little things that actually matter. Forget waking up to a ‘Good morning, sweetheart’ text; I’m talking about how sacred ‘love’ is.
Instagram has all of us believing that you’re only ‘officially’ together if you hang out together a lot or post a lot of selfies together and all that, but shouldn’t we know better? I’m guilty of believing in this whole Insta-scam because I was shocked at seeing one of my friends post a photo with their significant other when I fully knew they were going through a rocky patch. That is the kind of ‘reality’ that we all are living in: fabricated and content-oriented.
No offence to anybody who doesn’t like the idea of being in a relationship; this post concerns you in no way at all, so you can run along and go about your life as usual. But a few surviving old-school romantics like me still believe that love is more than just keeping up appearances on your social media and throwing money out for the dates and the gifts. It’s truly the thought that counts and not the whole material aspect of it all.
Being an old-school romantic in 2019 is a lot like being one of the last ones to hold on to hope during a time when all hope is thought lost. People will call you crazy for still believing in the sanctity and rush of the whole romance thing but in the end, there aren’t really any ‘sides’ because everybody is entitled to their own opinions and I completely get that. But I really wish that old-school romantics didn’t have to take the brunt of all the hate simply because we have hope in love.
Sometimes I wish things were as simple as sending hand-written letters to each other, filled with pages and pages of declarations of love, all things poetic and just the kind of effort that goes into a hand-written letter. These days, you can just step into a store and pick one out of hundreds of cards that have the same words printed in different fonts on different kinds of paper. Is that what something as important as a ‘declaration of love’ has reduced to?
And before we start playing the whole blame game where men start blaming women and women call men out for their flaky behaviour, let me remind you that no one is innocent. Everybody is to blame in this Age of Cynics that we currently live in. Personally, I think that neither men nor women should have an opinion on old-school love unless and until they ardently support it. If you don’t, it shouldn’t be any of your concern anyway, so why bother talking about it?
I guess if I could have my way, I would start a cult for people who are also old-school romantics like me, away from all the cynics and joy-kills who think there is no place for love in this world. Well, sue me for believing otherwise! There is plenty of love to go around and it’s only a matter of time before we collectively get sick of technology and go back to simple but meaningful gestures again.
As an old-school romantic, I can assure you that things like bringing flowers, hand-written notes, holding the door open, respecting each other’s decision, and going out of your way to prove that you really love your significant other, among other things, never go out of fashion. They are always admired greatly and I really feel like we shouldn’t shy away from going all-out when we love somebody.
Issued in the interest of true-blue romantics everywhere,
Cheerio! Xx
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Yours truly,
The Shubhster.
Featured Image by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash
The Shubhster Diaries 
I know how it feels likewise being an old school romantic in 2019.
That’s why I’ve always been attracted to the story of Don Quixote who clung to the ideas of Hope and Chivalry in a world and an age he lived in which hope and chivalry were looked upon as dead.
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