© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete 2005 revised text of Building Yourself, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's guide to living the successful life.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Building Yourself Table of Contents
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• I did but touch the honey of romance/And must I lose a soul's inheritance? Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the products sold in card and gift stores. There's nothing wrong with champagne or red roses by the dozen—except that too many people confuse this kind of thing with real love. Real love is some­thing very different from a shelf-full of romance novels or two lovely people walking on a beach on a TV screen. Real love involves real, fallible human beings. Real relationships must involve genuine, direct communication between two people. At some point, you need more than just sentiment.

One of the dangers of romance is to fall in love with love. Here the love isn't interpersonal—what it's supposed to be—but more of a romantic sentimental condition. You almost think the person being loved could be exchanged for another without skipping a beat. With many people who go from relationship to relationship, this is exactly what happens.

Romance is not love. It's something that works when we add it to love. Get the order right. If you want to be in love so badly that you can taste it, you'll never find it. By no means am I counseling you to be unromantic. Far from it. We talked about the etiquette of marriage in a previous section. All those little nice things are extremely important in a relationship. But you've got to separate them from the damaging romantic programming you get from Hollywood and the media. When you cut through all that syrup, you can let the person capable of great love out into the open.