A woman in her forties is sitting in her garden, waiting for the school bus to come home with her children on them. The sharp life she has lived is written all over her face, especially around her eyes and mouth, where the webs of wrinkles surround them. She is a beautiful woman with splendidly large dark eyes and a full mouth that Jolie would like. Her husband has just come home from work, but without saying a word to her, he has disappeared into the room, hiding a bottle of gin under her coat, she guessed.

For this woman, there is no hope of finding true love… she once had the chance, but now it’s gone. She has let it slide simply because they weren’t meant to be. She is sometimes bewildered by her decision: destined never to be together, always apart, and longing for the fairytale romance she could have had.

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Above is an illustration of not what love is, not what love is supposed to be about, not what romance is long gone…but it is about the loss of hope of finding true love. You see, I have been in contact with a divorced woman who craves love so much but doesn’t crave marriage. And I’m in touch with a teenage girl who thinks she’s found true love and that she’s going to marry her college roommate in a couple of years because he’s her knight in shining armor.

These women, divided decades apart when it comes to age, share one thing in common. Love. They are looking for love. One woman is looking for love forever without the commitment, the other is looking for love that involves an impractical perspective on what life will be like after the romance fades. They are both thinking about the knight in shining armor.

The older woman thinks she does NOT mind her knight changing from time to time as long as the romance lives on.

The younger woman believes there is only one knight in shining armor and unabashedly thinks he is the one. The younger girl has her heart set on the first knight who approached her, while the older woman believes that there is almost always one more knight out there.

Love is a constant work in progress… the process is endless and the search is endless, therefore there is no such thing as a single knight in shining armor. In comparison, the older woman is undoubtedly closer to the truth than the younger one. But her perception of her love is unreliable because giving up every time something doesn’t work out isn’t the way relationships are supposed to work. We’re supposed to work things out when things irritate us to the point where it’s no longer worth fixing.

The breaking point where the knight in shining armor becomes barley with bad habits depends on our individual tolerance, patience, faith, and willingness to turn a fairy tale into reality.

Love is the effort to put our heads back on the ground after discovering that there is no such thing as magic.