Romance is when a person regards a sexual partner or a prospective sexual partner with a fascination that renders any number of aspects of the person—the way a woman poses her head, the way a man strides across a room—as so engaging that the lover wants to remain in the company of the beloved for a very long time— or as it is put in the exaggerated rhetoric of romance, “forever”. This engagement with another person licenses the lover to attribute to the beloved any number of positive qualities such as loyalty, attraction, compassion, intelligence and so on, though it also licenses the lover to recognize the failings of a lover— his or her meanness or anger or duplicity-- without necessarily breaking the bond that ties them together emotionally and may simply mean that a lover understands that his or her beloved is a termagant or a bully or a nag or distracted. Love does not mean the forgiveness of all, only the acceptance of all, love being a way to think that the intensity of sexual passion is a window into the soul of the beloved.