Listening to romantic songs when you are young gives form and focus to your desires, they seem to hold a promise directed straight to you. And so you set about the project of realising those desires. You might come close to doing so, but only on occasions and never completely; even as they trace out a history these stabs at realisation melt away in your grasp, until it is clear that no matter how many layers of irony you wrap them in it is not in the nature of desire to be satisfied. If you listen again to those old songs you find that they contained no promises since they stood outside of time. They are purely images, and what you find is that the desires are perfectly subsumed in the image and don't reach out beyond it. There is a kind of transcendence in this which soothes the gulf between you and the world. The song is a taunting reconciliation, a sort of joke openly shared. Forgetting the song or whatever other lures backed backed them, the desires themselves are transformed into the stuff of beauty. Perhaps all desires, at least of the most disquieting kind, can be seen to follow this path.