Monday, December 14, 2009

Monday on my Mind! - Prince Charming


Hey there folks!

Welcome to another new edition of the blog- Monday on my Mind(MomM). Every Monday, I'll be writing about- you got it- what's on my mind.

In my last post, I mentioned Prince Charming, and it got me to thinking about the concept.

Women like to think of Prince Charming as the perfect man. Let's take a moment to examine the prototype, shall we. The two most famous Prince Charming's are probably the ones found in the fairy tales of Cinderella and Snow White.


So Cinderella's Prince Charming- What's so charming about him? He can dance the hell out of a waltz for sure! But do you really want a guy who falls in love at a ball, just because you're the best looking girl there and he never saw you before? I mean, it's cute to think that your guy will leave no stone unturned in pursuit of you. But really, a guy who will scour the entire land looking for you after one date? Not at all stalker-ish. (Insert sarcasm here.)


And Snow White's Prince Charming- hmmm. Let's ignore the fact that Snow White is a complete ditz to begin with, and just jump into where the Prince enters. So Ditz- I mean Snow White- has eaten this poisoned apple, since talking to strangers didn't almost kill her the first two times (more sarcasm), and she's fallen into a sleep that her housemates, the dwarves, can't wake her from. So they build her a glass coffin. In rides Prince Charming. And he does what any red-blooded man would do, seeing a seemingly dead girl lying in the middle of the forest- he falls in love! No hints of necrophilia anywhere in this story. (Mountains of sarcasm here.)

The ideal doesn't really exist. Even in fairy tales, where the world is a perfect place, Prince Charming is a necrophiliac stalker... not charming at all.

People are not perfect. In Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married, the male characters discuss the 80-20 rule, which in essence states:

You will only ever find 80% of the things you desire in an ideal mate, in one person. When your significant other supplies 80%, it's easy to look at others and find them attractive, because they have the 20% that your SO doesn't. But even though that 20% looks good at the time, if you walk away from the SO, you realise it's only 20% and the SO was the better deal.


Tyler Perry's "Why did I get married"

This in a nutshell is the 80-20 rule. It's also the Prince Charming dilemma. A generation of girls who grew up on fairy tales hoping to be the exception to every rule.

And the real Prince Charming? He might not be quite so charming or have such dashing good looks. He might not be able to ride a horse or live in a palace. He might have one green eye, one blue or, he might stay home from work to take care of you when you're sick. He might be the type of guy who walks for an hour to the nearest internet cafe so he can call you, during his 3 month exchange in Ghana.

Prince Charming is different for everyone.

But one thing's for sure. He's not perfect!

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