A Courtin'

Have I missed something here? I know things have changed. I was brought up with the good old verse that said that if you trained a child in the right way, he would come back to it. I wandered off that track, sure. I ventured into the forbidden fruit zone. I moved in with a heroin addict not even a month after I met him. And I thought I loved him unconditionally for eight years, even through rehab. Repetitively. Despite the sex, drugs and clichéd rock ‘n roll, I did come back. It took me twelve long years. All twelve of which I know my parents prayed fervently for the return of their prodigal daughter.
And one of the things I returned to? Being treated like a princess. Because the King (that’s Jesus Christ I’m talking about) is enthralled with my beauty. No matter what plumb line the modeling agencies and tabloids set for me, no matter whether I should break the 70kg plateau or not, wear red on my lips or dye my hair black, adopt the Goth or au natural façade, it’s just me. I guess, in my late 30’s, I couldn’t really care less.
But something confuses me. That blurred line between boys and girls called friendship these days. See…here’s what I was brought up to believe. If a man took you out to a movie, just the two of you, he was keen on you. If he invited you to coffee or dinner, he was a little of what you’d call in the ol’ days “sweet on you”. And none of that happened the way it does now. A man met your father before he took you out. There was no pressure to “put out” if he paid for dinner. There was no question of who was paying for the meal.
I fell for it recently. I blurred the lines. I liked someone and he took me out to movies and dinner and coffee and somewhere along those fuzzy boundaries (some of which, admittedly, I fuzzed), I thought I might have been his princess.
But I was wrong. Turns out he had lots of princesses already. Some of whose tiaras he’d already taken.
Thank God the King warned me. Before I gave up my crown to someone who could never have seen the sparkle on it the way a Godly man would have.