IS ROMANCE DYING?

Oamaru Mail, Volume XLIV, Issue 14707, 7 June 1920, Page 2

IS ROMANCE DYING?

The suggestion of courtship classes for lovers is such a bewildering, revolutionary idea th-t it leads directly to the question of what is the modern idea of love, says a writer jn a London daily. Love has been defined by a multitude of people since the days when love-missives were sent on stone slabs, carefully chipped out in 'the course of a year or two by an adoring swain who wore skins and carried a club. All the definitions are interesting and more or less original, but they all differ widely. The average young man who raves about "Spring anil all that" will tell you it is "a —er —well, a sort of a something, you know ,a ieeling—that's it! —which is absolutely great! You've 110 idea! Makes you want to sing and whistle and admire the flowers from the top of a 'bus. and smile at little children and bless them in your heart, and wonder why anybodv can grumble at the jolly old world, which holds sucn a topping girl as Phyllis —oh. daoli it! I say*. 1 didn't mean to let that out, vou know!"

He is probably doing his best, but he is not very illuminating. The modern young woman will tell you love is an attraction between two of opposite sexes, which makes them feel that nothing in the world matters except that they love each other. It is a "boundless affection, as limitless as the ocean, and counting everything as naught beside the possession of him —I mean, cacli other ——

She also is hopeless. It is the merest folly to ask lovers what is love. They do not know, and get 'bogged in the svmptoms, merely confusing effect with tlie cause. If you seek light from the married man, he regards you as a cynical humorist, and passes it off with a soulless remark about his income-tax.

Personally, I believe • love —if left alone by well-meaning reformers of the race —is still a combination of emotions in which heart and intellect hold most sway. Romance, iji most cases, plays the greatest part in love, and the instinct for parenthood and the cave-man business retire* well into the background. With the popular desire, however/ for thrusting "knowledge" down the throats of young couples and the publicity of the divprce court, daily washing all the nasty froth of human existenceinto the eyes of everybody, it is extremely difficult for modern lovers to be truly romantic. Necessary knowledge is wholesome, and the necessity for physical fitness for marriage a worthy cause to advocate, but care should be taken that this is not overdone or over-emphasised, and that it does not deal, a death-blow to that most alluring and mysterious attraction in the lives of lovers—namely, romance.