romancing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of romance.

   She was romancing a difficult client over a series of long lunches.

   Romancing the voters became his full-time job before the election.

   Note

   The -ing form carries two quite different verbs. With an object it means wooing or courting, and that stretches easily to winning someone over: one romances a client, a donor, the voters. Without an object it turns fanciful. To be romancing is to tell extravagant stories or build castles in the air. Whether an object follows tells you which is meant.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The process or result of embellishing something into an idealized, romantic version of itself.

   Like a travel brochure that shows only golden sunsets and never the long lines or crowded beaches.

   Her romancing of the old factory days ignored how grueling the work had been.

   The film's romancing of war troubled many of the veterans who saw it.

   Similaridealization, glorification, romanticization, glamorization

   Note

   A noun that can be counted. In Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed (1979), "those romancings of history that have always tapped the popular purse" treats each glamorized retelling as a separate product. The usual pattern is romancing of plus the thing idealized. That of-phrase and the plural romancings set it apart from the verb's -ing form, which takes a direct object instead.

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