The Girlfriend

I loved princess movies as a girl. Animated or live-action. Mainstream or B quality. Based on fairy tales or doll franchises or bizarre fantasy worlds. It didn’t matter. If the movie had a princess in it, then I wanted to watch it.

Adults used to tell me that I looked like a princess when I dressed up and curled my long brown hair. My friends told me that my name, Giselle Auclair, sounded like it should belong to a princess. And I devoured every movie with that theme I could find. That’s how I saw myself. A princess. Looking pretty. Being brave. And one day finding a prince.

That childish optimism didn’t last long, that hope for a good, handsome man out there in the world, waiting for me. When I was eleven, I was rocking princess vibes in a beautiful red dress as I sang a solo at our church’s Christmas pageant. It was that night—in that dress—when my dad told me he had to leave me and my mom and he didn’t know when he’d see us again. He’d hooked up with a younger woman and no longer wanted the small-town family life he felt trapped in, but I didn’t know that back then. I ran after him down the driveway, bawling and begging him not to go away, and he still got in the car and drove off.

He never came back.

I had a succession of selfish, disappointing boyfriends all through high school and college and in the two years after college when I taught history at the high school level before I decided to go to graduate school. By then my hopes for a prince had transformed into something more basic. To find a good guy. A trustworthy one who wouldn’t leave me or betray me. A perfect fit for me.

The year my search ended was when I met Damian Winters. Like me, Damian was a graduate student, and like me, he was trying to work his way through his degree without taking on student loans. He was farther along in his degree. I’d just started my master’s in history while he was beginning his PhD in English. But we still connected.

Damian is movie-star good-looking—he looks exactly like a prince from a movie—but I’ve never been physically attracted to him. I didn’t want him as a boyfriend. We were simply friends. Real friends.

At the end of that year, I was finally able to say I found a good guy at last. He wasn’t my prince or a romantic partner, but at least I found a man it’s safe to trust. To believe in.

Over the four years that followed, I added more good guys to my social circle. Men I like and respect. Who haven’t let me down. They exist for real, not just in princess movies no matter how much I wondered before.

The only caveat I’ve discovered is they have to remain in the friend zone. Whenever I try to move a man into the boyfriend category, he inevitably turns into the kind of selfish asshole I should be able to recognize by now. It’s happened to me more than once. A year and a half ago, a guy named Brian was hanging out with my group of friends for several months. I liked him and thought he was cute, so when he kissed me one evening and told me he wanted to be more than friends, I was interested. We dated hot and heavy for two months. He convinced me he was serious. Attempting to be mature and emotionally healthy, I worked up the courage to tell him I loved him. He didn’t say it back.

Instead, he said things were moving too fast. He was gone within five minutes, and he never talked to me again.

That was the last straw for me. I stopped dating and focused on friendships instead. I’m twenty-seven now and haven’t had a real date since Brian. I completed my PhD coursework at a large university in Atlanta and started my dissertation on Southern women’s political discourse leading up to the Revolution, and I’ve got more genuine friends than I believed possible in the past.

I’m happier than I’ve ever been before, and I’m planning to stay that way. Which means no attempts at romance. No more futile searches for a prince. No more laying my heart on the ground for a man to stomp on.

Only friends.

This reality has become a suit of armor for me. A protective shell against the way my formative years were spent trusting in men who did nothing but crush me.

The first crack in this shell happens as I’m on my way to a party at Damian and his wife’s place on a Saturday evening in April.