I Heart Dresses

Although some have called me a feminist (which is pretty funny) and although I like to think I'm super erudite and nonconformist to society's expectations of women and all that, now that I have admitted my secret dream, I might as well tell you:

I love dresses.

No, I mean, I really love them. Like I dream about them. If I became a hoarder, I'd hoard dresses. I love old dresses and new dresses and bridesmaid dresses and sundresses. When I was a kid, I adored paper dolls and I'd read L.M. Montgomery's descriptions of Anne's dresses over and over and over. A personal goal of mine is to wear a dress every day of the summer. (I've always been a high achiever.) One of the main reasons I don't like winter is that I have to wear stinky, stodgy pants.

Something I have regularly heard from the time of middle school up until the halls of my workplace is: "Why are you so dressed up?" My answer: "This is how I dress," followed by a stuck-out tongue.

Let me enumerate for you the beauty of dresses so that you too can join me in femininity:

• They are more comfortable than pants. Let the old myth die that pants are more comfortable. The dudes totally got the shaft on this one. There's nothing more comfortable than a long, flowing dress. Perhaps when we were oppressed by nylons and corsets, pants were more comfortable, but now dresses are fully superior. They allow for free range of motion of the legs, leaping and running across the hilltops.
• They are forgiving. If your belly grows, your dress just moves further up your waist. In pants, you have to buy a new size. In my world of expansion and contraction, this is an all-important asset.
• While being feminine, they leave far more to the imagination than the current vile trends in female pants, aka skinny jeans.
• They're perfect for a pear like me.
• I like wearing dresses because they make me different in my very small, very subtle kind of way.
• You don't have to worry about matching. No more putting on this shirt with those pants only to find they don't match and switching shirts, then pants, then shirt, then pants. What, you don't do this? My outfits will sometimes permutate 13 times before I finally decide what to wear. Which is kind of sad. You'd think I'd come out looking more interesting with all that work, wouldn't you? With a dress, all you have to choose is which shoes to wear. (Which is complicated enough on its own.)
• They allow you to still occasionally feel like a princess, even when your days are spent scrubbing toilets, answering emails, and all the other sundry non-royal business of life.

In conclusion, long live the dress!