If someone were to ask me now, what was the most romantic thing I have ever done for someone I loved, truth be told, I can't think of a single romantic thing I have done over the past couple of years, let alone for all my life. Sure there were the "desperate attempts to win back the person I love" to "spending my own money to be with the person I love", both of which requiring me to make huge sacrifices to my wallet and both feels utterly hollow in any mention of being romantic.

So I'm not the kind of guy who serenades other people at night under their window with a ballad. Neither am I a guy who would buy the girl he loves 1000 roses on Valentine's Day just to say I love you. I've never been that kind of person and after a while, you tend to notice the stark difference between a symbolic gesture of love and a flair for the dramatic. While for some reason, doing crazy things for the sake of love, is considered to be romantic, I can't think of a single situation in my daily life that I would go that far for. Sure, as I said before, I have done crazy things in the name of love, but ultimately, their acts feel disconnected from the very notion of love, at least to me.

Maybe I've reached that part in my life where being romantic isn't about doing the "best" or the "most", but rather consistently. If I spend every day for the rest of my life doing every day things that mean something to the person I love, that itself is more than worth a few occasions in a year where you have to spend extravagantly for it. It doesn't matter whether it's tossing a cold bottle of beer to her on the porch where we would spend the Sunday morning reading back to back. It doesn't matter if I bake her a muffin to add to her packed lunch so that she can eat it at work the next day. It just matters that the little things like that make up for something bigger at the end.

I guess it's because people always want something special in their relationships that they fail to see that it's overall picture of the relationship that makes it special. Since I'm not one for following the pack, I just kept on going with something unconventional seeing that normal relationships tend to fail. Yet the persistence itself pays off, and even if I can't remember the last time I've done something terribly romantic for Mel, it's not like she's starved for it either, despite our long distance apart from one another. So I must be doing something right, even if I'm not much of a hopeless romantic.

Or maybe I'm a hopeful romantic and I guess that makes a lot of difference after all.