Dream Marriages

We all have dreams. I don't mean the ones you experience whilst asleep, as they can be horrible, or in my case just plain uninteresting. Last night I dreamt that someone was knocking on the front door. I woke up and went to see, but whoever it was had gone, or not been there. This is probably the most exciting dream I've had for several weeks.

No, I'm thinking more about fantasy. We all have dreams of being rich, or famous, or powerful, or completing a Greek crossword. And I'm sure that even the most unimaginitive people find their imaginations taking them to all sorts of places when it comes to members of the opposite sex (and/or the same, if that's your thing).

It seems that lots of women have fantasy husbands. For example, Bee has gone for Brad Pitt, whilst Tracy is more of a Johnny Depp girl. I'm not quite sure why anyone fantasizes about being married to an actor - they make a living out of being other people, their marriages rarely last, and they're hardly ever seen as they really are without all that war paint:

Heavy night last night, Johnny? Mr Depp on his way to Makeup first thing in the morning.

Actress Myrna Loy was known as the "Perfect Wife", a kind of role that she played many times in films. In the real world things were very different. As she said: "Some perfect wife I am. I've been married four times, divorced four times, have no children, and can't boil an egg." Though with someone like her to wake up next to, I'm sure most men would have happily done without omelettes.

The Perfect Wife

Incidentally, fantasizing about stars isn't always as harmless as it sounds. Chicago Gangster John Dillinger was a huge fan of Myrna Loy, to the extent that despite being on the run from the authorites in 1934 he risked going to see her latest film ("Manhattan Melodrama"). The FBI shot him dead as he left the cinema.

Another option for fantasy husband appears to be a failed politician. Presumably they've failed because they weren't as good at lying and backstabbing as their more successful colleagues. Several bloggers, including Jean Knee, are taking fantasy turns being married to Al Gore. This kind of fantasy husband recycling is particularly popular with the environmentally aware.

Personally, I have difficult imagining being one half of a fantasy marriage. You probably need to have experienced a good marriage to be able to fantasize about them. I'm also hopelessly uninformed about celebrity lifestyle issues, so I'm not sure what being married to a famous filmstar or TV journalist would actually involve.


For a woman, the first part of any dream marriage is probably the fairytale wedding, and one recent bizarre idea is to go to Verona and get married on the balcony where Juliet stood whilst being wooed by Romeo. How romantic. Of course shortly after this they both killed themselves. Apparently there are a lot of American tourists who don't let this worry them. People who decided to splash out and go to Europe to get married instead of Vegas, perhaps.

Someone's idea of a dream wedding

Anyway, I suspect that dream marriages and weddings are for women. And people with extra large thumbs, judging from the picture above...