Hopeless Romantic

So I’ve come to discover that a lot of little girls spend a lot of time fantasizing about their weddings throughout their years growing up. This is actually a fairly recent discovery for me. And shocking at that. I had never really thought about weddings until my best friend got married while I was still in college. I was thrown into a total tailspin by all the stuff that goes along with weddings. I truly had no clue about all the schmutz that goes into “the happiest day of a woman’s life.”

What I spent my daydreams on was fantasizing about love. The things that the love of my life would say and do. I even spent hours making “Someone who would…” lists. You know, “Someone who would dance in the rain with me.” “Someone who would surprise me.” “Someone who would catch fireflies with me.”

I never focused on what we would do or what this person would look like and certainly not the details of a wedding. I focused on how it would feel. How it would feel to be adored. How it would feel to just totally give myself over to another human being for safekeeping. How it would be that no matter what day of the week it was, there would always be someone happy to have me come home.

The details never really mattered all that much to me. Because at the very core of who I am, lies a hopeless, unabashed romantic. Even when cynicism drips from every word out of my mouth there is a part of me that it literally screaming for someone or something to prove me wrong.

This integral romanticism has come to be one of my biggest attributes as well as one of my biggest downfalls. While it instills in me this never-failing hope which keeps me going even when I’m at or near bottom, it also opens me up to all kinds of hurt. Because I don’t close myself off to people. I have a hard time establishing boundaries. I wear my heart on my sleeve and I will do just about anything for someone I love. But I’ve learned the hard way that hard core romantics like me are few and far between these days. So I wind up getting my heart broken. And I cry. A lot. But then that eternal fountain of hope rises again and I pick myself back up and go back to the dreaming and wishing.

And at the end of the day, I guess I’m grateful for my romantic nature. Because heaven knows that in today’s world, an endless supply of hope is hard to find. So I’ll hold onto it. Even if it makes me a silly girl. I prefer the fairytales and maybe, just maybe, if I believe in them long enough, one will come true.