I took a class in college. A silly seemingly useless class at the time (you may form your own opinion on it). The class was called Marriage and Family, more or less a class that would teach you how to be married and in a family, aptly named right? Well one lesson we talked about was how each individual has unspoken expectations. The things that you expect but never say but still manage to get upset when those items are somehow violated. At the time this made no sense, and to some extent still seems silly to me. But I think it is silly because I will tell you straight up what is happening and which side is up, that tactic really only works if the person you are telling is listening and retaining. So that being said I have an “unspoken” expectation of the white knight. I knew with my last boyfriend that we were over the night he let me walk away and didn’t follow me. I mean I got up and walked out in what I thought was the middle of our conversation, apparently he thought otherwise because we broke up the next day. Here is my point: I do not want to be allowed to walk away. I am a forceful person and I do not want to have to be forceful all the time, I mean to say I need to have people around me who are not afraid of me, which is actually something that happens often.
So now would be as good a time as any to explain where the white knight title comes from… in the movie White Christmas Dean Martin and Rosemary Clooney talk about the guy on the white horse and how it can get awfully lonely up on the steed. I don’t doubt this to be true, but it can get awfully frustrating having to ask for someone to step up after having explained how to do it. I find that to be extremely lame, to quote a someone recently. The reason being is that when you have to tell someone how to rescue you or come after you it insinuates that you had to deal with the situation alone to tell them how to rescue you next time and had to return in order to tell them that you wanted them to come after you. Which clearly negates the whole act entirely. So yes in that sense it is unspoken, but really when you take into consideration that no girl wants to be the one doing the pursuing probably means that no girl wants to be allowed to walk away. Furthermore when you take into consideration that any person who hasn’t come after me isn’t in my life anymore, probably means I take the whole I am not afraid of you thing pretty seriously. But really makes you wonder why I still walk away when we are clearly in the middle of something…. I unfortunately do not have a good answer for that. It is just something I do when I can’t think of what else to do, maybe it is just a chance to give myself a minute to regroup, maybe it is because I know I have failed. I do not know.
My big lesson that I am learning right now? I don’t know how to say what I want. Maybe because it sounds silly? Maybe because it means I might not get it? Probably because it is silly and frivolous. I am a girl I want romance, I like flowers. There isn’t anything wrong with that. But saying that makes me feel silly. Saying hey I do not want to be the one dictating everything all the time makes me feel silly because I do not know how to say that without being the one doing the dictating… Just because I do not know how to ask because I am afraid of what comes next doesn’t mean I am not a girl who doesn’t want the white knight. Just means I am the girl who understands reality and has learned to be pragmatic after all the things that have happened. Sweet nothings aren’t something you ask for because you want them, they are the things you cherish because they are just that: sweet nothings that you don’t even notice until they aren’t there anymore…
