Fairytale Endings are Ending

Love is not a fairytale, no princes are involved, and no fairy dust to turn things beautiful. Harsh I know, but it’s the truth.

It involves commitment, cooperation, coordination, giving up things. Our generation grew up watching Disney princess movies. With the exception of Mulan, every movie had a prince come to save the day and sweep the girl off her feet. Now if a guy went to pick up a girl in public, the police would be called, a restraining order would be given, and the man would be left without a girl in his arms. Men used to court the women they were interested in: meet her family, have tea, bring flowers, watch from a distance with respect, and approach her with poetic words declaring his long-lived love for her. Today…the cops would be called as well and the man would be labeled a stalker and psychotic.

So we twenty-something-year-olds were raised in the romantic ideals of a fairytale ending and were left with a false hope of such ending for ourselves.

Who wouldn’t like Prince Eric aimlessly walking around a beach listening for our beautiful voices?

Or who wouldn’t want a street-smart, quick, cunning Aladdin rushing in on a carpet to steal food for us?

Who wouldn’t want the large, poor-tempered not-so-cuddly Beast with anger management problems?

 

I read another blog post recently about how it is happening more frequently that people to never get married. At first this was a little shocking because I thought everyone is told that they all have our soul mate out there. We are constantly told to never give up on finding our match because someone is out there made just for us. However this article quoted some statistics on how many people are staying single throughout their entire lives now. This is our culture today: one-night stands, flirting for physical desires, friends with benefits, and the likes. People are losing the sense of a relationship for many reasons and are becoming content with just “getting around.”

It may be because of our cultural norms to be independent, selfish in our goals and desires, and unwillingness to work with others. People think it is too much work to be married, too much commitment, too much of giving up something for someone else. Our individualistic society does not mix well with this. We want to get our dream job in the city of our choice, we want to spend our money on ourselves, we put our goals first, we, we, we. This competitiveness does not blend well with the survival of a long-term relationship.

Now the article did go on to say how it is okay to be single and not ever get married; it is not a weird thing or loser-like. The article also mentioned how all we need to do is be happy with ourselves. Fall in love with our own selves. It is a good suggestion because we need to be happy on our own; we don’t need a life partner to make us who we are, to make us whole, to define us. This part of the article was very thought-provoking and great to understand.

This article along with the idea that fairytale, magical endings are not as real as Disney made them seem, it just goes to show how much the idea of “love” and “romance” has changed. This a new era of love. Books and movies still demonstrate that sweet, old romance. Don’t set your standards of romance too high or too specific because chances are that you will meet your future spouse in a normal setting, you will go on typical dates, he/she will be of average stature, but the feelings will be magical. Just hold on to that small hope that the emotions and memories are filled with magic fairy dust making everything prefect, beautiful, sparkly. And there’s your perfect romance: of the mind.

 

 

XOXO