You are singing with the birds and the bunnies as you tell them about the dream you had last night. That dream where a beautiful man danced with you and an ecstatic connection was made. You sing about the amazing love you have found and suddenly he rides in on his white horse. You are nervous, but he gazes into your eyes and you realise you have met your soul mate, the love of your life.  And then the power cuts out and the TV blinks to a fuzzy leftover grey.

Blame the Box

I remember my first viewing of Sleeping Beauty. It triggered my obsession for both horses and dancing; while subtly imprinting my first desire for a candy-coated love of my very own. Someone who loved me, someone who defended my honour, who had a big shiny sword…

If my first introduction into the fantasy of the perfect, ready-to-wear soul mate, epitomised in the handsome, dashing and melodious Prince Charming, was a childhood fairytale then my teen years were marked by filmic adventurers. 

I think my first crush was the hockey captain Charlie from the Mighty Ducks trilogy. If you can’t remember these movies, it is because you merely lack my obsessive nature and not because you missed a piece of cinematic history. By the way, Charlie is now all grown up and remains a delightful specimen of testosterone and tortured psyche as Peter Bishop in Fringe.

My First Date

Cue the dancing, the extravaganza of fireworks both mental and physical, and the easily bubbling conversation of two people who were meant to be together. I had met him at a school dance and he had asked me out on a double date.

I don’t remember too much (karmic grace), the movie was whatever, but the one thing I do recall is his excessively sweaty hands and how his fingers literally got stuck to mine. Didn’t see him again, but I did fall asleep often on the phone as he kept calling me every evening.

I moved to the Cape about a month after that.  The two events were not entirely unrelated so cue karmic grace part two.

My First Boyfriend

I cannot say much about this boy because frankly I didn’t even like him. It was just nice to be asked out on a date when you arrived at a new school. There was nothing enjoyable about the experience and the idea of love receded into the same embarrassed feeling I got when I walked past the Mills & Boon section (karmic slug). 

In my eighteen years of life, I had not experienced that elusive explosion of attraction and connection. Hence I decided it did not exist. I actually wrote a very memorable school newspaper article on that (karmic justice).

Payoff

The truth is and was that I was using an external set of criteria to define love.  Other people’s experiences, fairytales and adolescent hormones all combined to produce a faux love effect. The reality is that when you really fall in love you can’t describe it, no one else will ever understand it and you will know that a soul mate is produced by your definitions of yourself dancing with another’s self.

Rather search for yourself first and then when Prince Charming drives up in a beaten old red bakkie, with aviator glasses and a wicked grin, the universe will centre, you’ll live on your own star and with one kiss the whole world becomes just the two of you. This is the karmic payoff for all the disasters or experiences that came before and the magic behind the fairytale.