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Twenty years ago, life seemed more romantic.  My boyfriend opened doors for me, I mailed him cute boxes of chocolates, he sent me flowers, and he taught me the box step on a front porch during a rain storm.  For some reason, I thought that romance would always exist in some way in my life.  However, as people and technology have evolved, my friends and I seem to experience less and less romance.  It seems that the only way I find romance nowadays is in the books I read and a seven-ounce Hershey bar.

For many of us, opening doors fades after the third date.  Sending flowers has been replaced by text messages – which means I received two dozen roses for Valentine’s Day.  It seems the foreplay of falling in love has been replaced with links to free porn.  Lastly, it seems that chocolate has been replaced with — oh, who are we kidding?  You can’t replace chocolate.  We just have to make or buy our own now instead of receiving it as a gift.

Online dating sites have no longer become a means of falling in love but are now instead hook-up sites.  Instead of wasting our time getting to know someone on a leisurely first date that one put thought and effort into, we engage in speed dating.  Kisses are hard and fast instead of gentle and timid.

Times change, and people evolve.  I’m sure cavemen didn’t send flowers and chocolates.  They might have given you a bite of the mammoth leg they were gnawing on, but no chocolate.  Even though it has evolved from the medieval times, maybe peaking in the Victorian Era, romance has definitely declined.

Maybe we’ve gotten here because women give certain things up more readily than they did fifty years ago, or maybe it’s because men expect it to be given up more readily.  Maybe, in our rushed world, we no longer take the time to make a simple gesture to let someone know how much we care.  Scarier yet, maybe we just don’t care…at least not enough to put some thought into what we do for each other.

So, even though many of us now look to a juicy romance novel to find our love fix, maybe we can keep some romance in our lives by thinking about what our significant other likes to do.  It might not be what you like to do; but sometimes, when you really care about someone, you do something you don’t like because it makes the other person happy.  Maybe it’s football, maybe it’s flowers, maybe it’s the ballet, maybe it’s a compliment that will make them stand up a little straighter during the day.  If only we could all just take a moment to do something that makes someone happy.  If it’s someone you really love, believe me, making them happy will make you happy; and that’s pretty romantic, if you ask me.

Happy dating!

Nine Days In Greece, the first in the four-book story of Katie and Costas, will be a free download on April 3rd and 4th, so mark your calendars!

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