impression

“You could've met you husband tonight,” he said.

I was already over it. Sure, the beginning was fun and intriguing, a guy approaching me and flattering me with words. He was cute, even hot with dark wavy hair, a cowboy hat and tanned skin. And he was tall. Then something happened. It all turned when he had to show us his old college id to prove he did attend the same school as my cousins. And then again when he and his friend tried to convince us that the movie company who had sent them to across the country to Wilmington, NC had put them up in a huge beachfront house. They tried to convince us to stay the night with them, even going so far as saying we could have our own room and lock the doors, no funny business.

I was done. Ready to leave but my cousins had spotted distant friends in other parts of the bar and I was left alone with these two. Later I would learn that my cousins had stayed away for so long because they thought I was into them. “No, no,” I said, “I was more in agony. I think the dark haired one nearly proposed.” I didn’t mention the fact that when the lighter haired boy stood up he didn’t grow taller. He was short guy. As soon as he stood up I thought I was in a movie, that these things don’t really happen. The short guy who looks a normal height while sitting doesn’t really exist and no man pulls a come on line like “You could've met you husband tonight.”

“I’m sorry, we have to go. We have to get back to our family’s house in Topsail,” was my reply. I didn’t know what else to do. And then when they followed us outside and kept talking, the desperation grew. The dark haired one had gotten the hint, his eyes no longer made contact. Was he really that surprised? He couldn’t have been sincere. That had to be a line to get me to his house. No one really says that.

As girls, our fantasies exist in a world where the man of our dreams walks straight up to us from a crowd of people and says something amazing and we’re done. It’s over. The white knight has come. But the reality is that we know the white knight is a figment, a conglomeration of fairytales, chick flick movies, and our mother’s dreams. And the thing is, we don’t really want the white knight.

A fantasy exists so that we don’t really grab on to reality. If we hold to the dream, the fantasy of being swept off our feet, then we don’t have to deal with the reality that relationships can be hard. We can brush them off. We can step aside and say, “Well, it wasn’t really suppose to happen like that anyway.” But when do we let the fantasy go?

Women can go from relationship to relationship, plunging in headfirst and then turn and leave. Pain comes with the leaving, but for men it’s different. When they fall, they fall hard. Are we to blame? Are women really snakes with forked tongues? I tell my friend who says this that not all of us, not every woman is out for blood. Some of us, or maybe even all of us, just want a best friend, and then some.