Where’s the romance on November 2, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

So here’s a really odd dilemma. My boyfriend of about a year just asked me to marry him. Great, right? Well, yeah, except there were no bells and whistles, no ring, no special moment, just–we had lunch, we did the dishes, he asked me to marry him–you get the picture. And believe me, I am nothing if not direct with this man–as soon as the subject of marriage came up, I told him I wanted the full shebang, including an engagement ring. (We are both in our 40’s and have been married before, so it’s not so obvious that I would want a traditional engagement.) When we talked about it afterward, he asked if I were disappointed that he didn’t go the traditional route. I didn’t say, uhhh, yeah, but I did tell him I thought there was a reason people set special moments aside in their lives–to say “this is a very important moment and I want to make sure this lasts in my memory.”

To present his side of the story: he said he was happy to do something special when he presents me with the ring, but he was feeling that if he put off asking just because he hadn’t found the right ring, or had to save up to buy it, or wait for the right moment to propose, that it would become an empty ritual. He also said that his proposal was un-premeditated and he just went with the impulse.

I said yes to his proposal, but I can’t seem to shake the feeling that, if he ignored my request about something this important to me–what’s he going to do when other important issues come along? I hate to say this, but I feel a little like a special moment and memory has been stolen from me.

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Classic advice from April 13, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

My boyfriend of three years has no clue what to do as far as romance, gifts, and manners. I love him a lot and we want to get married someday, but I’m not so sure. I can’t count on him, and every holiday when we get each other stuff, he puts no thought into the gifts and gets me the cheapest thing he can find (even leaves the price tag on stuff). I put a lot of thought into his gifts and I try to be as sweet and thoughtful as I can, I have even tried to give him tips ….? What to do?

— Carrie

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Get your heaving bosoms immediately to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and today’s covers of/commentary on retro romance cover art.

When even the Real Doll™ rejects your attempts to reach first base, it’s time to think about rewriting your eHarmony profile, is all I’m sayin’.

Via Broadsheet:

Today, as we know, all that’s required to be a good husband is to take your wife to a show, let her mother move in and lead the free world as a symbol of hope and change. But now we have evidence that some degree of enlightenment has long been expected of the male helpmeet. Witness this recently exhumed 1933 “Test For Husbands” (via Fark), which — while stating, in parts, the should-be obvious — is not quite as fossil-icious as one might expect. It assigns 1 demerit each for transgressions such as “objects to wife’s driving auto” and “snores” (and 5 for “tells lies, not dependable” and “flirts with other women while out with wife”), while awarding 5 points each for “gives wife ample allowance or turns paycheck over to her,” “frequently compliments wife re looks, cooking, housekeeping, etc.” — and, yes, “has date with wife at least once per week.” (Thirty years later, Don Draper: FAIL.) Precisely what kind of date is not helpfully specified. Today, thank goodness, we have Rick Santorum for that.

Another reason to look forward to spring?

Via BuzzFeed.

Falling in love is kinda like coming down with a fever: it creeps up on you, makes the cheeks run red, and the best remedy for it is to spend lots and lots of time in bed (hummina hummina). Then the fever breaks. In fact, for a long time running scientific wisdom has been that the fever might run its course in a mere year; after that, it’s dunk yourself in an ice bath, get a pacemaker to calm those heart flutters, and settle into a more platonic, less charged life with lovey.

Now a new study suggests that for a lucky few, that bloodsugarsexmagik passion is more akin to a really, really fortunate case of herpes for which there is no cure.

“Brain scans have proved that a small number of couples can respond with as much passion after 20 years as most people exhibit only in the first flush of love. The findings overturn the conventional view that love and sexual desire peak at the start of a relationship and then decline as the years pass.”

Only about 10 percent of the couples studied were found to pump equal amounts of dopamine through their systems when shown a pic of their betrothed as they did a couple decades prior. The researchers dubbed these couples “swans” because swans mate for life, but I mean, gag me.

No word from the study on the why and how of all this, but this primer on how to pucker might prove helpful.

The results of AskMen.com’s Great Male Survey are in, and some of the findings may surprise you. (Or not, assuming everyone in your relationship reads BreakupGirl.net and is therefore most excellent and discerning.) The “Internet’s top men’s lifestyle site” asked more than 70,000 readers to take the 150-question survey, which was broken down into five sections: Lifestyle, Dating, Sexuality, Power & Money, and Men in 2008. AskMen.com also teamed up with Yahoo! Shine, a lifestyles website for women, to host the Great Female Survey, which included 40 questions from the male survey about dating and sexuality. (Women, evidently, have no Power or Money, and are interesting only when talking about men.)

The survey’s goal — and this is where we’ve got their back — was challenge the all-too-common image of today’s men as immature, insensitive, and afraid of commitment. Says AskMen.com editor-in-chief James Bassil, “These survey results will be surprising to many women, most of whom have a completely different perspective of what the average man thinks and feels.” Selected results after the jump…

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Phomance: the old-fashioned kind of courtship, where you talk on the phone rather than email and text? Nope: phomance, comes the word from CNET, is a type of phishing scam aimed at the online dating community. “We’ve all done foolish things for romance,” writes Ben Nahorney, about his interaction with a phlirtatious phomancer from the phormer Soviet Union, who was, as he tells it, “‘I’ll wire her money just to take care­ of her sick puppy’ gorgeous.” See where the scam might come in?

Fortunately for everyone but the scammers, Nahorney is not only a member of a dating website, but also a senior information developer at the security software company Symantec. BUSTED! In his blog, Nahorney describes the warning signs that came along with his initial feelings of hope and excitement, and which tactics he pulled from his own bag of tricks to reveal the true nature of their would-be victim/would-be scammer relationship.

But you don’t have to be, well, a senior information developer at a security software company in order to sniff out a phony. Nor should you quit online dating in phear. Just remember what BG says: “be aware, but don’t be scared.”

I for one, believe that the human need for love and romance is indomitable, and two recent articles — one focusing on young women’s point of view, the other on that of young men — in the New York Times’s Generation Faithful series totally back me up.

In Saudi Arabia, as the articles describe, the opposite sexes live nearly entirely separate lives — the harsh and hardly women-friendly restrictions are a topic for another post — in a culture that values carefully arranged marriages in support of large familial groups. The details herein are fascinating, particularly for revealing the ways that young Saudis do yearn for romance, love, and intimacy even as they embrace traditional and religious restrictions against co-ed interaction before marriage. They also show the extent to which technology is aiding and abetting forbidden exchanges between young men and women with the same — or perhaps even more intense — excitement, hope, and fears shared by people everywhere. I mean: they’re prohibited from flirting, but their ring tones all play love songs.

One question I was left with: what happens to the romance of the anticipated and the forbidden once these young folks do get married? Conventional wisdom holds that arranged marriages often do form the basis for solid, lasting bonds. If so, can they offer some pointers? Or should we at least be more open-minded when our moms want to fix us up?