White Knight Syndrome Ruined My Marriage
How I learned to stop being a “savior” in my relationships—and how that saved me.
White knight syndrome
By Rowan Embers
“So what I hear you saying is that you are considering bringing a child into the world…the biggest commitment and sacrifice one can make…when you don’t feel ready, or even remotely interested…just to make your wife happy.”
The guys in my men’s group knew me better than anyone. They listened to me share my messy truth every week for over three years. They were the best mirrors I had. It usually felt deeply healing to be so seen. However, this time, when I heard their reflections, I shuddered with shame and confusion.
At 27 years old, I was just finishing grad school and beginning my career as a psychotherapist. I was excited to build my private practice, and with my ability to work remotely, follow my dream of traveling the world to study a style of dance called contact improv. My wife at the time, however, was 10 years older than me, her biological clock was ticking, and she was eager to root down and start a family. I was ready to throw away my dream in exchange for hers.
These men saw all that. And wanted to make sure I saw it too. How had I gotten to the point of possibly becoming a father just because my wife wanted to?
These tough questions from my men’s group catalyzed a turning point for me—I took a hard look at my people-pleasing or “White Knight” tendencies, and ultimately found how to “dismount” from that seemingly glorious, but ultimately self-defeating, role in my relationships.
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Part I: Raised To Be a White Knight
So how did the White Knight Syndrome begin for me? And what is it?
To me, the White Knight Syndrome is an amalgamation of motives that centers around the desire to fix and rescue others, and is similar to the dynamics of being a “savior.” Think of a chivalrous knight on his trusty steed swooping in to save a distressed princess from the clutches of a fire-breathing dragon. Think of the glory, the sacrifice! I say “White” to convey flawlessness, no imperfections (or needs) to stain the clean fairy tale, or inconvenience her royal highness.
Of course, it has a major shadow side, but I didn’t know that as a well-meaning, sensitive child, when my people-pleasing tendencies were just taking shape.
Growing up, I realized that I was loved for how well I met my mother’s expectations, not for “just being me.” So rather than living authentically to meet my own needs, my body learned to attune to my mom’s desires and be whomever she needed me to be. And who did she want me to be? A selfless White Knight, in her own image.
My mother had her own kind of savior complex, dedicating most of her time to nonprofits that served abused and neglected children. However, she overdid it, due to her own conditioning. Which meant that while she was being a public-facing hero, working long hours, she neglected her own inner child and her own actual child—not meeting my emotional needs. To try to win her love, I followed her lead. I learned that performing acts of service to those less fortunate, like the homeless, was the way you settled your debt of privilege and proved that you were worthy of love.
Even so, her love was not forthcoming, so I tried other strategies to “earn” her love. I could sense when my mom was depressed, and I tried to lift her up by offering my warm embrace or my good grades. I became an extension of what she needed to feel good. At times, I acted like a surrogate spouse to my mom, giving her massages, listening to her problems, offering the emotional attunement that my dad couldn’t provide. It was confusing.
Still, the “shadow side” of this White Knight role was only beginning to surface. As I got older, and initiated new “attachment-based” romantic relationships, the horse I had been riding on so gallantly began to buck me off completely.
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Part II: Finding a Princess in Distress
I met her—my wife to be—on a tropical beach at a hippie festival. We were wild children: climbing for coconuts by day, and raving to psy-trance with half-naked Europeans by night. She was gorgeous, thoughtful, and coy. We drank the intoxicating jungle juice, and became inseparable. We opened up quickly, aided by the loosening effect of psychedelics and the liberating environment. As she opened up to me, I listened carefully for what she needed.
She told me she wanted to be treated like a princess. She had been badly mistreated by her previous boyfriends, and for most of her life. The key was turned in the lock of my heart, and the lock of my unconscious desire—to rescue, pamper, and save Rapunzel from her castle of misery. I wanted to be the White Knight who took her far, far away from her pain, to play forever in the enchanted playground of my carefree nature.
The next day I bought a return ticket to California, tagging along on her adventure, abandoning the rest of my plans. Three months of traveling later, we moved into a community house in the Bay Area right before I started grad school. We basked in the gooey feelings of the honeymoon phase. Each moment together was exciting.
However, even as we luxuriated in each other, and I showered her with love, the attachment dynamics of my childhood started to appear. I often ceded my own needs, like solitude for my creative practice or going dancing with my friends. I started to lose myself in trying to please and care for her.
When I spent more time with classmates than with her, she would complain that I was neglecting her needs. Consumed by the overwhelming guilt that I was perpetuating the same emotional neglect of my childhood, I abandoned myself and gave her all of my spare attention.
My lack of boundaries and my fear of letting her down twisted us into a codependent dynamic. I was unable to tolerate her sadness and felt overly responsible for her well-being. I was constantly vigilant over how she felt, and if I noticed a twinge of sadness, I would rush to cheer her up—the same thing I had done for my mother decades earlier. If she was lying in the bathtub all day smoking weed to cope with stress, I would beg her to tell me what was wrong or to seek professional help.
I wanted to be the White Knight that saved her from the fire-breathing dragon, but I was unknowingly enabling her to use me as a crutch and to avoid the seething mass of unprocessed trauma beneath her substance abuse. I was so preoccupied with taking care of her, that I was now neglecting the needs of my own inner child, who just wanted to play and not need to worry about others.
It was at this point that I was considering having a child with her, and that the brothers in my men’s group held up a mirror to me. As I became more aware of my White Knight tendencies, I learned hard lesson after hard lesson as our relationship spiraled downward.
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Part III: The Ruthless Knight Falls Off His Horse
A breaking point for this dynamic was when I criticized her for not handling a conflict the “right way,” and she called me on my bullshit.
This happened at a board game night when I accidentally dosed myself with LSD. I was raiding the freezer like a hungry racoon, when I came across some mysterious, frozen gummy bears. I realized later when the board game got hard to follow and my teeth felt like shiny diamonds, that I was indeed very high.
Later in the evening, with my defenses down and my mind loosened, I let myself express my frustration with my wife about how she got triggered earlier in the day and handled a dispute poorly with our housemate. She did not use nonviolent communication (NVC) like I had taught her, which involves clearly owning and sharing your feelings and needs. Instead, she reacted passive aggressively. I criticized her for not doing it the “right way.”
She reflected back to me how I was treating her like my mother treated me. I was trying to sculpt her into the perfect partner, all the while not accepting her, which made her feel like shit. Through the pain I was causing her, I re-experienced the hurt of my inner child, who always felt “not enough” growing up. I was deeply saddened that I was perpetuating the same wound onto the person I loved the most.
I also realized why it was so hard for me to watch my partner lose control and get hijacked by her triggers. The part of me that was trying to change her was the same part of me that fought so hard to survive—the sensitive boy that was powerless over his environment.
…The boy who listened to his father and mother fighting through the crack in the door and prayed for them to stop.
…The boy that watched his drunk father beat up his brother, powerless to protect him.
…The boy that watched his baggy-eyed mother stay up until the wee hours of the night trying to save the world, while he craved her time and presence.
And now here I was, passing along this harmful dynamic.
I constantly compared her to others who had traits that I envied and wanted her to have. I once told her that I wished she was more like one of our good friends, with whom I would often have stimulating philosophical conversations. Of course, this was very hurtful for her to hear. English was not my partner’s first language, and she often could not keep up in heady discourse, especially late at night when her brain was moving slower.
I would tell her that I wished she would read more thought-provoking books, so that we could have deeper conversations like the ones I had with my classmates in grad school. Paradoxically, I loved that she spent less time in her head and was more connected to her senses.
I didn’t get the emotional mirroring and attunement that I needed as a child, and now that I was in this very intimate relationship, all those unmet needs were coming out as unreasonable expectations that my partner “should” be able to meet in each moment. My mom expected it of me, and I rose to the occasion, at great personal cost. Now, I was codependent with my partner, needing her to fulfill all the traits that I idealized in order for me to feel whole. I wanted her to be my perfect princess, like my mom wanted me to be the perfect son.
Yes, it was enabling her codependent patterns to persist, like not taking responsibility for her own behavior like smoking weed all day in the tub when she was depressed. But more than that, it created this enmeshment, such that our identities were too wrapped up in each other and I couldn’t just accept and love her for who she was. Instead, I actively tried to shape her, “fix” her, so she could be the partner I imagined her to be. Which sent the clear message: she was “broken” or “not good enough” as she was.
After I finally came to terms with our patterns, I had many months of struggling with the confusion as we withdrew our overly intertwined lives, and figured out where each of us began and the other stopped.
Even so, I was stuck thinking I couldn’t leave the relationship, partially because we were so enmeshed, so entrenched in the reality that I was her lifeline, her anchor, her purpose, her sunshine, her everything. It was a deluded dynamic that we both unconsciously co-created. A dynamic that allowed me to feel important and helpful while actually getting in the way of her taking ownership of her own life. It was both intoxicating to be her savior, and also so scary to believe that I was the sole thing keeping her alive.
All of this meant that the end of our relationship was messy. And hard.
* * *
Part IV: After a Hard Dismount, We Walk as Equals
Towards the end, I became burnt out and exhausted.
I kept finding myself in the middle of her conflict with our friends. I was constantly pushing her to go to therapy to work on her slew of childhood trauma. All the while, she was numbing her pain with cannabis, which triggered my trauma of growing up around addicts. I wasn’t happy.
She would ask me to just be honest with her about what I wanted—if I wanted to stay with her or leave. But I didn’t even know what I wanted, because I was so tangled in my allegiance to her. I wasn’t aware of how scared I was to leave her, how it would affect the cohesiveness of our tight-knit community. Part of me didn’t believe that she would survive the breakup, and if she didn’t survive, I wouldn’t survive.
The men’s group continued to help me by untangling my undying allegiance to her and discovering what I actually wanted. Her strong desire to have kids was the tipping point and my impetus to finally accept that I was in a relationship that was no longer aligned with what I desired.
During the breakup, she talked about wanting to die, screaming at me that I was heartless, selfish, and didn’t care about her. We enacted a “no contact” policy. She was on her own—writhing in the pain of the loss.
The hardest thing for me was to be okay with the fact that I was the cause of her suffering and now I couldn’t do anything about it. The White Knight in me wanted to ride in on my trusty steed and shield her from the hurt, save her from the fire-breathing dragon, but now the fire was consuming us both, and I was the one stabbing her in the heart with my sword. I wrestled with so much guilt. Did I abandon her in the same way as her parents did? Am I selfish for leaving someone to whom I had committed?
Fresh into the breakup, I had many dreams of her looking for me, following me down serpentine paths, peeking through my window, a ghostly figure with big puppy-dog eyes. The hardest thing was to turn away from her and keep walking.
Eventually, my dreams started to change.
I learned to sit with the feelings.
I learned to trust that she was okay.
As more time passed and the hurt settled, we were able to reconnect in waking life. We have had teary-eyed conversations in which we have embraced and shared mutual gratitude for the relationship.
We decided to perform a ritual to further cut the energetic ties between us and mark the transition into a new relationship dynamic—one of friends. On the new moon, we each meditated in front of a candle and recited the following words as we thought about our connection. I was in the bedroom of my new partner’s house and she was in an ashram in India.
I wish you well as we now part.
I choose to follow what is in my heart.
Each must walk our separate way.
Our vows are over on this day.
I release you with love and gratitude.
I forgive you and I forgive myself.
I am free and so are you.
On the other side of the breakup, I can see my White Knight more clearly for who he is, and the true drawbacks and inaccuracies of his worldview.
I lacked the faith that my partner could carry herself through the difficult moments and chart a new path without me. I overlooked the huge reservoir of resilience she possessed as someone who left home at 16 and practically raised herself and her siblings.
I had to accept the fact that she was not broken and that I could not save her. I had to let go of my need to rescue and learn to tolerate the intense pain of watching someone I loved suffer. We were equally human, with our own gifts to nurture, and burdens to bear. I had my own inner child to take care of and I had to let go of caring for hers.
I am now in a partnership that is deeply in alignment with my current dreams.
I am with someone who is equally as committed to prioritizing her own healing, building community, and traveling the world as I am. I realize how much easier it is on my nervous system to be with someone who is not relying on substances to cope with emotional pain. I can feel more relaxed and less on guard.
There are times when my hypersensitive parts can sense when my partner is struggling, but I’ve learned to trust that she can take care of herself, and if she needs some emotional support she will ask me. Sometimes, in an effort to protect her, I avoid conflict between us. However, I have come to realize that this often backfires, and causes my partner more pain than if I had just directly and compassionately spoken my needs or feelings.
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Part V: Laying Down Our Shining Armor
These learnings have been reinforced by my work as a psychotherapist.
With my clients, I realized that I couldn’t actually heal anyone; I could only provide a comfortable space for my clients to surrender to their own pain. If my success and self-worth was intertwined with my client’s healing and growth then I would be coercing them to change for my well-being, instead of supporting their innate capacity to heal. I became a therapist to be the present, loving witness I needed when I was a deeply insecure and sensitive adolescent.
I find that other White Knights are often deeply empathetic, feeling other people’s emotions intensely. They are deeply burdened by the inevitable guilt of not being able to protect their loved ones from pain and suffering. They struggle to accept that they are a deeply flawed human being with wounds of their own that need tending to and care from others.
As men, we are bombarded with stories of men who put their lives on the line for a cause greater than themselves—think of any superhero movie, the idolization of war heroes, or even the fetishization of martyrs. We are taught that “real men” perform grandiose acts of service for a “higher purpose.” However, when that higher purpose is helping another human, it is often self-serving, an unconscious attempt to fulfill a need to feel important, ignore one’s own pain, feel a sense of safety or belonging, or to boost one’s wounded self-esteem.
It also reinforces the idea that the person whom they are trying to rescue or fix, cannot take care of themselves. And that assumption actually interferes with authentic connection, creating a codependent dynamic where the White Knight gets their self-esteem needs met, but isn’t actually fully seeing their partner or cultivating a healthy, interdependent relationship between two whole human beings. It masquerades as intimacy, but is surreptitiously, often unconsciously, manipulative.
And other men can be invaluable comrades in supporting each other to dismount and take off our shining armor.
I still participate in men’s work, and every time I get a chance to be witnessed in my vulnerability, I feel a greater sense of belonging and safety in the world. I feel less of a need to prove myself to others. I feel less burdened to be heroic, to save the world—or anyone else, for that matter. Instead, I can get off my horse, take off my armor, and just be open to myself and others.
Discussion Questions for Readers:
Our whole purpose is fostering conversation on vulnerable topics, and growing a culture of healthy integrated masculinity. We encourage you to reflect on these questions, or ask them to other men in your life. You can use our Story Discussion Guide to walk you through how to facilitate a ~90 minute group discussion.
Did you have to “earn” love from a caregiver or “prove” you were worthy of love in some way? If so, how did you earn it? How does that still show up for you today in your relationships?
Do you resonate with being a “White Knight” in some way? When have you been a savior, martyr, people-pleaser, or rescuer? How did it impact your relationships?
Have you ever tried to “fix” someone to be more like how you want them to be, subtly reinforcing that they weren’t enough as they were? Have you ever appeared to be helping someone else, but it was really for you? How did that play out?
Have you ever felt “stuck” in a relationship dynamic? What were the reasons you told yourself that you couldn’t change things (e.g. “She might not survive if I leave”)?
Have you ever had a break up that resulted in real growth and learning for both people? Were you able to establish a healthier dynamic after space, time, or a ritual, like this author?
Have reactions, questions, or similar stories that you want to share with the author? You can email us at editors.realmenshare@gmail.com and we’ll forward your message to them. Thanks for engaging on these vulnerable topics!