Happily Ever After Starts With You

Fascinated by fairy tales, who isn’t, right? Fairytales develop our values and attitudes to life. Whoever is looking for the perfect romantic love has such great sources of magic inspiration!

The hope for a fairytale can even inspire us to continue pursuing our perfect love in real life. A perfect love story idea that can raise our expectations, making it difficult to sort the fact from the fiction. Is planting the seeds of a perfect love story and making us hope that our Princess or Prince exists in reality.

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Fairy Tale Endings Don’t Exist

The classic stories, the ones that a lot of us grew up on are fantastic. From classics to bestsellers, those romance stories have a special charm.

But they miss the most important part about love, the part of how every day is lived in our lives, where we find love unfolding every single day, for good and bad. The part that can carry us through heartaches even if it doesn’t always come easy. Love means overcoming obstacles more than once.

A conventional interpretation of the fairy tale character roles may easily make adults biased. It can be tempting to raise unrealistic expectations as to the qualities of potential real-life partners and even to the dynamics of the couple relationship.

Moreover, in the modern usage of the fairy tales, when Cinderella’s Prince is confronted about his womanizing, he states “I was raised to be charming, not sincere.”

Being charming is not enough to live happily ever after in the real world.

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But Being Treated Well Isn’t Just For The Fairy Tales

A true love story is not a fairytale, it’s a relationship. And a relationship is a great adventure. It is about being with a person who is as complex and imperfect as you are.

True love is not a hide-and-seek game. In true love, both lovers seek each other in a two-way street constantly under construction.

You can stay in love forever but your story doesn’t end when you get married, nor does it begin. To build, nurture, and stay in a relationship takes vulnerability and constant effort.

Develop Self-Love First

To give better chances to feel and live true love in your relationship you need to understand first the important role that self-love plays.

Depending on the partnership for satisfaction, happiness, validation, or self-worth it just not healthy. In general, depending on other people to make you feel love doesn’t help to develop healthy relationships. No one can make you happy the way you can make yourself. A relationship should be a partnership, not a codependent situation.
Loving yourself while being in a relationship is as important as loving your partner. Self-love doesn’t take away your individuality, it enhances it.
Losing your sense of self and becoming absorbed into the relationship may affect your freedom. Maintaining a degree of space and independence helps you to find happiness in you as a person.
They say that knowing when to go away and when to come closer is the key to any lasting relationship.
Exposing flaws is a natural part of any relationship. Don’t let it get you down or get in the way of self-love.
You can’t be insecure and needy and then wonder why the kind of people you attract are not the right ones. Some partners tend to treat you the way they see you treat yourself.
Instead of working to change others you better work on yourself and make sure you meet your own needs.
Never love anybody who treats you like you’re ordinary. This means settling for less than you deserve.
By showing love to yourself you give better chances that your relationship not to be drowning in disappointment.

No doubt about it — the importance of self-love in relationships cannot be overstressed.

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Instead of Happy End

We better grasp the meaning behind a story and relate to its morals. After all, fairy tales can teach us some sort of moral/ethical or common-sense messages. We should enjoy the power of storytelling as it is, but avoid mixing it with our reality.

Happily ever after is not a fairy tale — it’s a choice, isn’t it?

“Life is a fairytale if we know how to write the story.” ― Debasish Mridha

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This post was previously published on Hello, Love and is republished here with permission from the author.
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