Lauren’s Opinion: White Knight
Disclaimer: This is an opinion.
While we ventured into chlorinated wars in England, and followed Derby onto the horse track, Love Ledger Entry No. 3 – White Knight– brought a whole new perspective to the castle romance.
Some entries have been sealed shut for a while in my ledger. This one happens to be fairly old. I hesitated sharing it as it’s somewhat a tender spot for me even after all this time. But occasionally, a man comes along that challenges your prior perspective, changes you for life, and raises the bar on every men after him. This is probably my shortest opinion too.
Enter my White Knight.
I say “my” because at one point in time I felt he would be that or at the time that he was that for me. I had no idea that he would be so consequential but we cannot always predict how things will go. In many respects, though he’s the oldest so far of my ledgers, he still is the most transcendent of them.
Why if he’s been go so long?
I think the main reason is because of how interested he was in me becoming the writer I am today.
He wanted me to be successful and asked me very curious questions about my writing. He always made me feel as if my beauty, while he was certainly taken with me, was not the most attractive thing about me that I had offer. He made me feel seen in a way that no prior man had – like he wanted to explore places in the farthest corners of my mind that other men hadn’t even bothered to look for.
It was wildly sexy. He also was a very masculine man.
What do I mean by “masculine?”
Like I touched on in Derby, I have a view of traditional and White Knight was certainly that. He did all the things you would expect when a man courts you and he did them beyond sometimes what I expected. I felt very safe with him, allowed him to lead me, and found his decisiveness and decisions to be agile.
He also read for fun which had to be the hottest sentence to ever leave his lips in my presence. He was handsome, sort of nerdy, and made me feel as though, unlike Derby, he planned to read many chapters about me to discover who I was. At times, it was also exposing. England moderately made me feel the same way in his observations of me which was why the impact of his later actions hit me so hard.
They were similar and yet different.
All the ledgers have taught me something special about myself – I am a traditional woman. In the right man’s presence my femininity and traditional values pour out of me. I wear dresses more, don’t feel as guarded, and flirt more intimately. But mostly, I imagine myself at home with more children. I imagine myself doing things more slowly, cooking for my family, and finding pleasure in the ordinary life beside a man.
My walls essentially are made now to keep the wrong men at a distance and allow the right man to allow me to feel safe enough not to have to build walls in the first place. They are selective architecture.
It’s not for everyone. But the truest and richest parts of me crave that – or so I’ve learned.
What did White Knight teach me about dating?
White Knight taught me the difference between desire and capacity. White Knight desired me. He was in my life – in and out – for almost a year. He chose me often, albeit not consistently. He wasn’t ready for what I offered to him even if that is ultimately how he saw his life with a woman – traditional.
He also taught me that sex isn’t just some casual thing each time. It can be… but sometimes feelings sneak up on us and we develop them without trying to do so. It happened on both ends. It’s also taught me to not oversimplify dating ideas around sex. Just because the relationship didn’t fully formalize doesn’t mean the sex we had or how we felt was meaningless. The White Knight also reshaped how my sex life would be reoriented back to God’s design – serious, committed, and marriage minded.
White Knight’s largest impact was that no matter what my friends said to me about who I wanted to date, the choices I made, or even the husband I had been praying for – that since the White Knight existed in this world that someone who is attractive and shares my values also exists.
He renewed the hope that masculine men still exist – even if they are rarer – in their strongest and equally most tender forms.
It doesn’t mean the White Knight wasn’t an amazing man – he was. I loved him in the time I did know him. But it also means until another knight with the same values and same attractiveness, but has readiness appears – my heart will remain in that tower. Does that mean it’s forever locked away?
Some days it feels as though no knights are swift enough to scale even the first few feet of the wall. They give up after only a few small tries.
It doesn’t mean they’re horrible – none of the men in my ledger are necessarily horrible men. But they weren’t the right fit for me.
That’s the point of it being called Lauren’s Love Ledger. What is right for one woman might not be right for me – that’s the best lesson from this somewhat “sealed” file of my White Knight.
And even though the tower is high and represents my standards rising from my encounter with him, it doesn’t mean another knight isn’t capable of meeting me as I am. That’s the beauty of a quest – the Right Knight will select it and adventure to climb the walls. And he’ll most likely find that it wasn’t that there were tons of obstacles my heart has created, but that once he climbed consistently, he’d free me and I’d give him a key to the front door.
Though the White Knight raised the proverbially bar, it doesn’t mean the standards are a man must prove himself heroic or that I need White Knight 2.0. It means that as I’ve grown in my relationship with God and created safer boundaries, White Knight carried a lot of influence over how I relate to men.
So what happened to the White Knight?
While I keep his ledger mostly sealed, the one thing I will share is that I had to grieve him fairly heavily. He didn’t get to come with me as I became an author and I didn’t end up being able to share that daily joy with him as I had imagined.
“Even in laughter the heart may ache, and the end of joy may be grief.” Proverbs 14:13