Can you be a feminist and an old romantic?

I would quibble with Mill on needing to be identical in opinions...

I think you can. I am a committed feminist, but also very deeply in love with DH and we are really quite mushy after 6 years together.

The key for me is that our relationship is equal, we take it in turns to look after each other and be looked after.

If he has a job interview I will iron him a shirt and cook him a special breakfast, but then when I get a promotion he'll make me dinner (actually he makes dinner most nights but he'll make my favourite meal, say).

He respects me utterly (as I do him) and has zero expectations that I should look or behave in any stereotypical female ways.(He doesnt give a toss whether I shave my legs or armpits, he just tells me I'm gorgeous).

Our ideal of marriage is this, and in fact we had this as a reading at our wedding:

"What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and reciprocal superiority in them?so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development?I will not attempt to describe. To those who can conceive it, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear the dream of an enthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest conviction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage; and that all opinions, customs, and institutions which favour any other notion of it, or turn the conceptions and aspirations connected with it into any other direction, by whatever pretences they may be coloured, are relics of primitive barbarism."

• John Stuart Mill, Subjection of Women

EandM, he made you a b-day cake! YOu see, for me the sexiest thing is a man who is so confident that he doesn't have to prove anything by being hyper-masculine. Hyper-masculine men are such are turn-off. WHereas confident men appear more masculine because they've got nothing to prove.

Of course you can be an old romantic and in love forever and be a feminist.

But I don't believe that the best thing that can ever happen to a woman is meeting mr. right and getting married. No, I don'T believe that at all.

I've never seen Bright Star, but where does this idea come from that feminists hate romance?

I have issues with a lot of the ways in which popular media portrays "romance" - men harassing and persisting and basically stalking women who've said they're not interested, for example. And like blackcurrants said, the idea that true love means subsuming yourself into someone else.

But I've been with my husband since I was 20, and 12 years on we are still romantic. We dress up in nice clothes for a romantic dinner, we light candles and drink wine, I always bake him a really elaborate, sickly-sweet cake for his birthday because it makes him happy, he sends me flowers at work if I've had a tough week, sometimes at night he'll snuggle into me after we've both showered, sniff my hair and tell me he loves me.

Always intrigued to hear what feminists are thought of by people who don't identify that way. But it's just wrong.

I loved Bright Star, btw...

Oh blackcurrants I totally agree, with all of it. My DP is a feminist and has no issues about talking about his feelings, or being seen as "unmanly" for spending hours making me an amazing birthday cake for example. I have never thought that a man should make my life worth living, or that I should devote my life to bringing another adult food and cleaning up after him. That is not romantic though. Nor is giving up your own family/friends/self-respect to prop up someone else's ego. What is romantic IMO is looking after each other, trying to think of big and small ways to make each other's lives better, and planning adventures together.

I loved that film OP, and for once it was nice to see a love story without any misogynistic crap in it TBH. She is not obsessed with getting married and having baybees while he just wants to drink beer with the boys, for instance. I'm not afraid to be soppy when I'm watching something like Bright Star, it's not unfeminist to be moved by other people's experiences. In fact it's empathy, which is pretty important to making the world a better place.

Of course you can Feminists are allowed to be happy!

I don't think that my feminism gets in the way of my idea of romantic love. In fact I get pretty soppy about my partner.
What I don't do is think that he completes me, that I needed him and only him before becoming a real or valid person, or that my life was meaningless without him. What I don't think is that my life is subsumed into his, that either of us is 'in charge' of the other, or that there's anything romantic about violence and abuse in the name of passion...

Doesn't stop me plotting cute surprises, paying him compliments, snuggling up to him, declaring my adoration, or jumping his bones, though... I feel like the most romantic relationships I've been in have also been the most feminist, because the feminist men I've known and dated have been the ones most willing and able to talk about how they feel without fear of censure or being thought 'a bit gay.'* Also there's nothing romantic about ending up someone's drudge/housekeeper/substitute mum. Give me a feminist man any day, who wants to go out with real person with her own ideas, rather than wants his home nice and his arm-candy oggle-able!

*(seriously, how did we get to the point where a man telling a woman he loves about his emotions is suspected of being homosexual? Our notions of masculinity are SO messed up!)