Knights and Dreams

You know how little girls spend their lives dreaming about the men that will ride in on horses? Their Knights in Shinning Armor? The ones with whom they will live happily ever after? Usually in the stories...and therefore the dreams too...the Knight is on a dark horse, in some royal robe, with a sword of course. Like every little girl, I liked fairy tales well enough. But unlike most girls, I've spent most of my life believing that he, my knight, didn't exist.

I think it's something to do with the fact that I don't dream. Literally or figuratively. Because the few times I've dared to let myself do so in a figurative sense, those dreams have gotten squashed beyond recognition. So figurative dreaming, therefore translated to hoping, isn't something I'm prone to do. It's not worth the disappointment. Rather, I choose logic and rationality. Then when dreams, literal or figurative ones, come true for others, they seem more real to me. (This also connects and helps me cope with the fact that my literal dreams are messed up.)

Even as a young girl I remember making checklists of sorts for the "man of my dreams." Sometimes they were actual lists. Sometimes just ideals in my head for how he'd have to be. I've probably saved a few over the years. See, if I were to have a man, if he were to exist, there was (and maybe still is) a rather long and specific set of characteristics he'd need to fit. No robes, no horses, and really no storybook likeness at all. And then in my later adolescent life, I added the component of being super sensitive to the opinion of others ideals for who he should be, just in case I hadn't set the standards high enough on my own lists. Well-bred, educated, rich, able-bodied. All of this criteria has almost literally, and definitely figuratively, made it impossible for men to find me attractive or approachable.

Somehow unwilling to relent to my logic completely, the little girlish dream never completely let go though. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a straight female without "Knight in Shinning Armor" dreams. Mostly it was driven by society and then I think something inside me that wanted desperately to believe he was out there someplace. Because all the books said he was. Everyone else seemed happy to believe it. What was wrong with me? And so a little fraction of the women I am has remained that little girl, always dreaming and hoping, beyond her logical brain, the her Knight is out there someplace.

Lately I have been finding myself wishing I hadn't made so many lists. That I hadn't bought into my need for logic and rationality. That I was more able to embrace my dreams and hopes. Somehow that would make my life a little easier to live right now. I simply don't believe in all this Knights and Dreams nonsense we make little girls fall for so blindly. But for the first time that I can ever remember I really really want to believe it all.