I always have trouble understanding why something is romantic but something else is not. I went to shopping with Pat today. We saw some bag with different pattern, she pointed at one of the bags with some kind of flower pattern and said that’s romantic. The bag next to it has a similar flower pattern and I asked whether that one is also romantic, Pat said my pattern is bad taste. Women love romantic things, but men, especially engineers, always have problem found the boundary of romantic and end up falling into the trap of bad taste.

I know the academic definition of romantic. Given me a piece of music, literature, philosopher and architecture etc, I can found out whether or not it is from the romantic period. Romantic era has different characteristic that make it distinguish from the classical period or the modern period. Romantic is definitely not rational, mechanical, well structured or simple. Romantic is not chaotic, that belongs to the post-modern era. However when it comes to pattern, I can tell what is not a romantic pattern reliably. But after I filter out all the patterns violate the romantic rules, I still can’t tell what is a romantic pattern. I wonder what am I missing from my romantic spotting algorithm.