Ideal Love

So this concept and idealisation of ideal love is a curious one.  I am genuinely bemused.  I believed in it.  All of it.  I thought I had found it.  Like a fairy tale story.  The prince who finds the girl and she gets to be a princess.  Like a child I daydreamed that I was that girl.  Yet ideal love, the kind I believed he gave me is just the fairy tale start.  Not the fairy tale ending like the books might suggest but the entire reverse. 

Childlike stories tell of princes who climb mountains, slay dragons and travel for days and nights to find their princess.  It all ends in a fairy tale wedding and the story ends.  We never actually learn about them and their life.  The story has ended by then.  Yet when dating a narcissist it is all mixed up. 

We don’t really know who he is when he arrives, and then all of a sudden we are living a fairy tale life.  The thing it, he hasn’t had to work very hard to get his princess.  He has used words, yes and he may have bought gifts and made gestures that ensure we feel special but that’s his rush to the fairy tale part.  He is in such a hurry to have it, the really hard work got missed out.

Here is the irony of the upside down ideal love story.  When the fairy tale has been secured, he then wants us, the princess, to do all the hard work.  There are no dragons to slay but there is peace to keep and the mountains certainly need climbing. 

As the woman in a relationship with this supposed prince we will work harder and harder to get the fairy tale back, the one we had a teeny taste of. 

The sad thing is fairy tales don’t exist.  It's so far from the real world that ultimately reality bites and what we are left with is how people actually live their lives and have relationships. Normal relationships are completely different. 

I have been thinking about this a lot today.