"The fantasy is the lack of transaction"

This is why you men fail to find and keep love. As long as you hold to this nonsense, you'll always end up alone and/or lonely. You will be disappointed in your relationships.

There absolutely IS something wrong with transacting to define value. It will not give you romance.

Romance is not being loved for who you are, especially unconditjonally. Romance is (noun) a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love. A quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life. (verb) court; woo.

What you're talking about, is validation (noun) recognition or affirmation that a person or their feelings or opinions are valid or worthwhile.

Romance is the little things you do to show someone you care about them and are excited to see them and that they're part of your life.

The problems with confusing romance with validation are legion. But, here are a few points.

1. Romance is meant to ongoing. Validation cannot be. If you need constant validation, you become an emotional leech, a gaping black hole of never ending need.

2. Men should want romance without boundaries. If you confuse romance with validation and you want it without boundaries, then you're setting on a path to abuse. Look at the definition of validation again. What if your feelings or opinion is something that harms another. Should that opinion be validated? If that's the only way you feel loved, you've created a problem for yourself and you will never be loved. Love cannot exist without trust, kindness, fair play, and boundaries.

3. Any woman who commits to constsntly validating a man a performance od romance is setting herself up to be destroyed. Men like this (who need constant validation) are very capricious by nature. The goal posts will always move, nothing you do will ever be enough, and it's going to escalate every time he gets up in his insecure feels.

4. Needing constant validation from your partner makes you a low functioning person. You're someone who needs to be carries. You're emotional dead weight. You're childish and mentally undeveloped. You never grew up.

I would love to see those so called sources on how to cultivate a relationship aimed at men. I suspect they're more dog and pony show nonsense, transactional, alpha male ideological bullshit. Stuff based off 18th and 19th century philosophers which has been thoroughly debunked numerous times.

And yes, I have plenty of sources about cultivating a relationship. Men do need to do better. Women are stepping up by stepping away. We're not your mothers.

And we return to wanting to be loved for who you are. The problem here is that many people are genuinely horrible or self serving people. I'm sure Hitler wanted to be loved for who he was too. And maybe Ava Braun did. But would most people conclude that Hitler was deserving of love? What about Ghangis Khan? Khadafi? What about the guy down the street who abuses his children and his partner? Would most people agree that he deserves the "love" and "romance" of having those actions validated so he feels good about himself? Of being "loved" for who he is? He's a tyrant.

This is why genuine love requires boundaries and romance is not thr dame as validation.

Also, gender essentialist ideologies tend to make meaningful validation impossible anyway. The validation comes in how well you perform your manhood or womanhood compared to someone else or some arbitrary standard. There's always going to be somebody better at it than you and who sets the standards and keeps them reasonable? This is not a good way to spend one's life and waste one's heart.

Get a dictionary. Learn what words actually mean. You'll be less likely to be propagandized with wishy washy ridiculousness.