The trouble with fairy tales

I've always been a romantic.

When I first started writing in grade school, I would write love poems, even if at the age of ten, I had no idea what real love was. As I moved away from poems and into prose, I found myself writing love stories about best friends falling in love with each other. I collected Sweet Dreams and Love Stories, teenage romance novels that were also about best friends falling in love, or the bad boy falling in love with the good girl, or the jock falling in love with the nerd. Even in adulthood, I gravitate towards chick flicks where the guy always gets the girl in the end.

The trouble with surrounding myself with these fairy tales is that I had become conditioned to believe that love ends with happily ever after. That you may fight a little, but you'll still end up with each other because you're meant to be together! You've found The One! He was right beside you all along!

The thing is, love is nothing like that. As I've learned, love isn't supposed to be easy and it's not even romantic. When you get down to it, love is a conscious decision to be fully present to another person. This means caring about that other person's life, being involved, ready to offer a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on, cheering them on, and really knowing them. It includes knowledge of mundane things like food allergies and random things like being afraid of cats and total darkness. It means knowing a little bit about childhood anecdotes, but not so much that there's nothing new to discover.

Fairy tales never tell you about these things. They don't tell you what happens after the prince and princess rode on the white horse and into the sunset to their happily-ever-after. Does the prince snore and keep the princess awake all night, making her cranky in the morning? Does the princess have an annoying habit of leaving her clothes on the floor instead of putting them in a hamper, like a real princess should? Do they ever argue about which kingdom to visit over the holidays? Fairy tales don't tell you these things because these are issues of real life, which only means that the fairy tale is over and real life has begun.

The trouble with fairy tales is it makes you believe that real life is not a story in itself. I suppose it's why a lot of couples like to say "the honeymoon is over!" when troubles begin to arise. But I've found that real life is so much more interesting than the fairy tale. After all, there is beauty in the way the prince makes a cup of coffee for the princess as a way of apologizing for keeping her up. Everyone has annoying habits because no one is perfect. And arguing --if done correctly-- is a way of challenging each other and can teach you both a thing or two about yourselves to make you better people.

Now, when I read a book or watch a movie, I see it for what it is: a work of fiction. Because once you turn the last page and the credits roll, the more beautiful story called Real Life continues.