34 Behaviors That Creep People Out Now But Once Were Considered Romantic, As Pointed Out Online

To this day, when we talk about romance and beautiful, sublime love, we often remember the Renaissance, gallant chevaliers, ready to cross swords for the honor of the Beautiful Lady, performing serenades under the balcony of the mistress of their heart...

Stop! Stop, stop stop! So we really think that putting a foot of iron into another person's belly just to impress our crush is that damn romantic? Or throwing stones at the windows of a sleeping girl so that she, sleep-deprived and angry, will listen to us in a bad voice yelling a poorly rhymed song about unearthly love - is that beautiful? It turns out, as this viral thread in the AskReddit community confirms, there are lots of outdated “romantic” techniques.

More info: Reddit

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Okay, let's remember one of the most romantic stories of the Middle Ages about the unearthly and unrequited love of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri for the young and beautiful Beatrice, to whom he dedicated many sonnets and poems. Now let's get a little dry reality: Dante was 19 years old when he first saw 8-year-old Beatrice, but many years later she married another man.

Dante's great and unrequited feeling did not prevent him from marrying another woman, who bore him three kids. However, in none - you hear, in none of his works does Dante mention the name of his wife Gemma, while Beatrice, who by that time had already passed away (yes, mortality was sky-high in the insanely romantic Middle Ages), remained on the pages of his poems until the last years of his life.

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Now we'll have a time skip and go to not so long ago - about forty or thirty years. How many times have we been presented with some story as proof of incredible love about how a guy was rejected by a girl more than once or twice, but continued to literally pursue her - until he finally achieved reciprocity? Or about how a lover secretly found out the place of work of the subject of his passion in order to regularly get in their way... Now this sounds a bit creepy, doesn’t it?

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“Of course, each time has its own viewpoints, and what was completely acceptable a couple of centuries or even a couple of decades ago, today we consider absolutely strange or even creepy,” says Irina Matveeva, a psychologist and certified NLP specialist, whom Bored Panda asked for a comment here. “The evolution of our views is no less impressive than technological progress.”

“We shouldn't forget that morality in the old days was completely different and, for example, any European noblewoman of the Renaissance would have ceased to respect herself if she hadn't had a couple of no less noble admirers who would have fought a duel for her attention. This was the unspoken etiquette of that time. Today it seems strange to us, but... well, maybe in a hundred years our habit of sticking to TikTok will look just as weird..." Irina presumes.

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Well, if you somehow find yourself in any of the stories presented in this list, you shouldn’t do an instant facepalm. In any case, critical thinking and a sense of humor will allow you to distinguish what's truly romantic from what only seems so. And now, our dear readers, please feel free to scroll this list to the very end and, who knows, maybe add your own ideas and tales in the comments below.