When I was a young girl, I believed in the fairy tale version of love. That a prince/handsome guy would sweep me off my feet at first sight and we'd live happily ever after. While we like to think that we can keep our childish dreams as we grow up, a few broken hearts later and our views change a bit. Even though we grow cynical of our fairy tale love lives, we still crave that romantic ending. A Happily Ever After. Unfortunately, life doesn't give us our endings. Boring marriages, unhappy relationships, lonely women. This has lead to a very profitable movie genre: romantic movies.
These movies help renew our childish dreams. Each predictable, love-filled, stereotype of a good/romantic relationship touches our hearts and stays in our fantasies. It lifts us up and helps us through the tough times. The romantic, lovable characters could be us: we could be the woman randomly bumping into the perfectly flawed man who will fall in love with us and give us the life we want.
The problem with this scenario is that we judge all our relationships based on what we see in these movies. On our fantasies. As we know from growing up, life is not like that. Our relationships are not like that. The difference is that our men are real. They're not some character created to tug on our heart strings with perfectly thought out speeches. They're human. Real men make mistakes, say crappy things, and are not mind readers. But, in the case of us lucky women, they love us. They may not show it the way we want them to, but they worship us in their own way.
The point of this post isn't to give links to a bunch of good movie clips. It's to put things into perspective, ladies. It's good to have a dream. It's good to have the fantasy. But don't expect every moment to be like a romantic movie. At times, it can be a disaster. A relationship isn't just the attraction and the love, it's also about working through the disasters together. During which you may want to kill your significant other. I highly recommend not following through on those urges. It's messy. But if you love a person, and you feel it's worth the trouble, you'll get your happy ending.
Wishing everyone their Happily Ever After this corporate-created, consumer-driven joke of a holiday :-) Happy Valentine's Day.
