For most of my dating life I’ve suffered from a terrible disease. It’s scared off potential boyfriends, scuppered relationships and wrecked havoc with my love life. It’s been inescapable, and has followed me wherever my life took me – from University, to work and back again.
Its name?
My Best Friend is a Man Disease.
Not a gay man either, but a strictly heterosexual man who became the big brother I never had (and probably worse than any big brother nature could have given me) and appointed himself as my fierce protector.
Imagine a knight sworn to protect his Princess from ruffians after her hand in marriage and her kingdom, or a brave Sir who has vowed to protect her innocence and you may be close. Just take away the armour, weaponry and pretty white horse and add slightly more swearing and threatening to break people’s legs (true story).
And also add a complete failure on the protecting her innocence part. Oops.
It wasn’t always intentional and full of threats. Simply going for a night out and spending most of it deep in conversation with a man is enough to make most other men assume that he’s a boyfriend and not just a friend and I suppose I never really did do anything to disprove those assumptions. I was usually too busy laughing at my brave knight’s recent disasters to even care.
There were of course nights and events with his friends. Usually it was work colleagues of his who typically knew that we were just friends and you’d think that potentially, this would be easier…. But, my brave knight worked with these guys and knew how they treated women so it was even more difficult to strike up a conversation without my knight interrupting things (this is where the threat to break someone’s legs comes in).
Eventually my knight found a Princess of his own to guard, fell in love with her and they are currently building a kingdom of their own. I moved half way across the world and am now surrounded by samurais instead of knights. Does that make things easier? I guess that’s another blog entirely!