What Ever Happened to the White Horse Scenario?

G. Mendelson
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

Funny thing about love and romance — we all have our own sense of what it’s supposed to be like. How a guy and a girl get together, somehow hit it off, and fall in love.

For me, I grew up in the era of the Disney cartoon movies. In every one, there was a theme, a narrative, that presented a damsel in distress, suffering at the hand of an evil sorceress, who longed for her knight in shining armor. Enter stage left, the prince on his white horse, who destroys the evil witch, and saves the girl, taking her into his arms. They fall madly in love, and live happily… well, you get the picture.

This is how I grew up understanding what love was all about. When you’re seven, you tend to take things on face value without knowing any better. Movie after movie, I watched the eventual success of each and every prince or knight, and thought to myself “Hmmm, so this is how you get a girlfriend?”… I was seven, okay?

Fast forward, many years into today, and in the back of my mind, I am still haunted by the memories of those successful princes and knights who got the girl, time after time.

I grew up, went to school, got a great job and career, a house, a dog, a nice car, and turned out to be a decent human being. So where is my damsel in distress now?

As it turns out, damsels are no longer in distress; in fact, they never really were. Damsels are only in the movies, as it turns out. Today, women are independent, decidedly picky, analytical, unpersuasive, diligent, and in some cases, better equipped to save people than most guys are. I have yet to meet a damsel, although I think I have some women who were close, only to find that they were playing my dumb ass for a fool. Can’t a prince or knight catch a break?

And yet, I still long to find my damsel — the beautiful princess in distress, looking for me to come to her aid, and save her from her suffering.

Anecdotally, this to me equates to finding a woman who’s dealing with crap in her life (her evil witch), waiting for a great guy, for example me (the prince) to come up to her, fix all of her problems (slay the witch) and come live with me (the Happily Ever After thing). I think about it for a moment, then catch myself daydreaming, at which point I tell myself how stupid I feel, and drop the thought like a bad date.

But if I were to look at it from a modern standpoint, in today’s society, I still think it’s a romantic, though unreasonable, gesture. Some of today’s best romcoms (romantic comedies) are based on a guy who happens upon a girl who can use help with something, and the two fall in love. This, to me, is living proof that my idea of love when I was seven, was not so off base after all.

Truth be told, even today I STILL dream about galloping into a woman's life, saving her from impending doom, and thus sealing our fate as lovers forever. Heck, I wouldn’t mind if a woman decided to save me.

The white horse scenario sounds like something from a Disney movie, but to me, it is the epitome of true love, as narcissistic and chauvinist as it might come across. The dreams and musings of a seven year old couldn’t have been too far off, if so many of today’s romantic comedy movies hold the same theme.

And so I go through life, still thinking that if I could find my damsel in distress, that I can find true love and live happily ever after. Every day that goes by, that thought gets older and dustier; but I still hold onto it for dear life…

… because true love, after all, is best served with a side of romance — and you can’t get much more romantic, than a white horse.

G. Mendelson

Written by

Published writer for The Huffington Post, LinkedIn, and TED.com; Admirer of the elusive true love…