Or, I should say, they exist, but not how we traditionally think of them. I think if working together, two people can make anything a fairytale that suits them. Any relationship can be a good one with enough communication, love and forgiveness. But I digress, Webster’s defines fairy tales as “a story involving fantastic force or beings; a story in which improbable events lead to a happy ending” and my all time favorite “a made up story usually designed to mislead.”
So I have been thinking about relationships lately and why so many of the relationships around me seem to be suffering. And one reason (of the several) that I came up with while watching a Disney movie with my daughter the other day was that we teach little boys and little girls what relationships should be very differently. What we learn from our parents and family effect us from day one and add to that what we watch on tv and hear in our music and we have created is, if you will, a relationship cluster f$%k.
We have crippled ourselves in this relationship game by not starting out on the same foot. We force feed fairy tales to our little girls. From the age that they can watch an hour long movie, we turn on the classic and new Disney princess movies and fill their heads with boy meets girl, boy falls madly in love with girl, boy saves girl and they marry and live “happily ever after”. (Disclaimer: I am in no way blaming Disney for being the total basis for the misrepresentation of how a relationship or even falling in love works to little girls. Please, no lawsuits.) It only gets worse as they get older through literature and adult movies, commercials and television shows and music – love songs are the worst! They all create a dreamy picture of what love and marriage and relationships are.
On the other hand, we teach our boys through social media that what is important in this world is achievement, conquering, putting up a fight and winning the hand of a woman who is to take care of your needs is important. They got none of the fairy tale pumped in to them unless they happened to watch with their little sisters like my son is subjected to. But in his opinion, they don’t affect him the same because he has “man logic” whatever that is.
The disparity in our humble beginnings sets us up for failure. All of the stories say how a man or woman is to be won – not what comes next. And our girl grown up woman is expecting it to be “happily ever after” while our boy grown up man is just looking for more dragons to slay and thinks that the woman he married should be happy while he slays them. In my humble opinion, we need to start teaching reality to our kids so that maybe their relationship habits will be better than ours … we need to stop believing in fairy tales ourselves first.
