A few weeks ago, I wrote about the traits of a conscious partner. Practicing mindfulness, focusing on giving, and working on oneself are all important elements of an evolving consciousness.
I also wrote about how the spiritual perspective of “being awake” involves waking up from the illusory nature of reality. From a spiritual perspective, human beings are born into ignorance, unaware of the true nature of things, caught up in life’s drama as if it were real. Our spiritual path involves waking from this dream and dispelling the illusions that prevent us from seeing the truth, including the truth of who we are.
I did not, however, touch on perhaps the greatest illusions of all, one that has become so ubiquitous in our media that we believe it to be of the utmost importance. That illusion that keeps us locked into a limited understanding is what is known as the fairytale love story. If we finally see this tale for the fiction that it is, not only will our relationships improve, but our life will, too.
But what does it mean to wake up from one of the greatest delusions of all–the love story?
Dropping the fiction
I often wonder about the effects that film and television have on our collective psyches. As a child, I remember being really disappointed to find out that “mutations” in our DNA did not give us superpowers in the form of X-ray vision or the ability to read minds, instead causing deleterious developmental effects. I also remember fantasizing about giving resounding speeches in front of dumbstruck audiences until one person started clapping and the whole crowd slowly joined in.
But, so far, at this point in my life, I have never seen a fighting ninja turtle, nor a slow clap turn into a standing ovation. Instead, I have found that the real world rarely lives up to the expectations and tropes we find in film and books. And while we recognize that the X-Men or Harry Potter universes are fictional, the human mind will still look at these interactions between humans and integrate them into unconscious models that inform how the world is supposed to work.
Too many action movies, for example, overplay the “coolness” of the good guy killing a bunch of bad guys, failing to account for the intense psychological trauma of death and suffering. One great shift in maturity from fiction to real life is that, while so many narratives are based around good versus evil, rarely is this ever the case in life.
While we love the to see “good guy” win against the “bad guy,” when it comes to life, there are seldom perfectly “good people” and perfectly “bad people.” The idea that no one is perfectly good or evil is captured perfectly in the quote by the Russian Philosopher, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And, even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
Many people become disillusioned when they realize their heroes are not the perfect humans they thought they were, such as when they learn about Thomas Jefferson’s slave ownership, Mahatma Gandhi’s treatment of women, or Mother Theresa refusal to treat sick children with modern medicine because she believed that “God will heal them.”
But perfection and perfect good is not how the world works. Nothing is perfect, and things rarely happen the way media portrays them. Malcom Gladwell talked about this phenomenon in his book, Talking to Strangers, writing that good actors are good at showing their emotions clearly and plainly. As a result, we think that it is natural for a persons behavior and facial expression to be aligned with their internal emotions.
In one study, for example, participants watched episodes of Friends, except with no sound at all, and were asked to guess what the characters were feeling or experiencing. Because the actors were good at their jobs, they accurately portrayed what they were feeling with their facial expressions and body language. It doesn’t work this way in the real world. People don’t often convey exactly what they are feeling to the world around them. Just ask any person who is depressed or has been depressed before, and they’re tell you how easy it is to fake happiness.
Everyone expresses anger, sadness, and grief differently. This is just one more reason to be kind to everyone you meet, because you never know what battles people are facing or have faced in their lives.
The fictional models we see in the media give us a lot of false impressions about how the real world works and what we can expect from others. This discordance is huge when it comes to one of the biggest myths of all. We see it over and over in Disney movies, romantic comedies, Hallmark commercials, and family dramas. The fairy tale love story.
Seeing the fairytale for what it is
I’ve heard it, you’ve heard it, we’ve all heard it. A tall handsome man meets a younger woman, and, despite all odds, they fall in love and live happily ever after. But, as you have probably noticed in your own love life, things don’t always work out the way we want or expect. That is because love is messy. So much messier than a 90-minute film can get across.
As a result of the fairytale love story being so deeply ingrained in Western consciousness, our expectations around relationships are sky-high. Never so much in human history has so much emphasis been placed on the couple for physical, emotional, and spiritual fulfillment. We expect our partner to be a passionate lover, caring parent, therapist, and bank account all at the same time. The noted relationship therapist Esther Perel summed it up perfectly in this way:
The modern ideology of love is compelling. Never before has the couple been such a central unit in our social organization.
Never have we expected more from our intimate relationships, and never have we crumbled under the weight of so many expectations.
The fact of the matter is that physical attraction is easy. Falling in love is also easy. In fact, it is a pretty straightforward cascade of chemicals designed to propagate our species.
Staying in love, on the other hand, is much trickier. What most people call love is really just the beginning of love. But love, like life, goes on, and we have to be there for the other person through the ups and downs, through the good days and bad days (as well as the good years and bad years).
And, during those years, the family rarely looks like the heteronormative nuclear family you see on the TV. Every couple moving into parenthood needs to establish the village necessary to raise children, which may include aunts, uncles, grandparents, nannies, or even neighbors who can take on even an ounce of the burden of raising a child. These days, there are also step-parents and step-siblings. There are single parents–both by choice and due to painful divorces. There are gay couples, kinky couples, queer couples, swinging couples, and polyamorous throuples.
The messiness of love
There is also conflict, and every relationship will overcome friction in different ways. Sometimes, one-off affairs happen and remain a secret indefinitely. Multi-year affairs also happen and sometimes even those stay secret. Sometimes, these affairs are discovered and, after years of therapy and growth and healing, the couple stays together. Other times, an affair is discovered and, within a day, someone has packed their bags, taken the children, and filed a restraining order.
Real love is unpacking childhood trauma. Real love is exploding in anger over something insignificant and apologizing later. Real love is made up of tremendous joy and also incredible boredom. It is complicated, messy, beautiful, agonizing. It is not perfect, because nothing is perfect.
Love is learning to be okay with the mess, and not just about lowering your standards of cleanliness once you become parents, raising little rascals that like to draw on walls and make flour sandboxes in the kitchen.
In real life, there is no “ever after.” There is only today and tomorrow and the next day and the next. Hence the popular quip by Robert Frost,
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.”
Sex is messy, too. In fact, one of the best sex tips I’ve ever received was: If you want to have great sex, you have to be okay with a mess. Because, if you’re worried about keeping your house clean during your next physical encounter, you are going to have a bad time. Sex creates a mess of clothes and sheets and, in the process, a dinner table full of dishes and wine glasses, as well as involving a variety of fluids (sweat, saliva, lube, and you-know-what-else) and a variety of not-so-great smells. As anyone in the sex industry will tell you, be glad you can’t smell porn. Few movies will quite capture the romantic essence of morning breath or that imperfectly timed, “hold on I have to pee.” Sex can be awkward, sex can be funny, and, with STDs/STIs, it can be scary. We can say the same of life, too.
The point is that real life cannot be copied and pasted from one relationship to the next. There is no paradigm, roadmap, or model we can find in any book or movie. Every person is unique, so the meeting of two individuals is something that happens at one point in time and never again in the history or future of the entire universe.
Writing your story
Seeing the fairy tale for what it is shouldn’t dispel romantic notions of relationship. Rather, it should be promising and hopeful, because there is no singular love story to which everyone should aspire to. Instead, there is only your love story.
When I interviewed the relationship coach Roy Biancalana on the Learn to Love Podcast, one of the biggest takeaways was that we should be in charge of writing our own love stories. He encourages his clients to decide whether they want to be a victim or a creator. Victims believe things happen to them, while creators believe things happen because of them. Creators see themselves as the leading actors of their own movies, in charge of their own narratives and writing stories for the lives they want to be living. We should all see ourselves as the creators.
So no, life is not a fairytale, but it can be a story–a story that you are writing right now. It becomes a story when you realize that love is a choice, and that, every day, you wake up in the school of life, where the curriculum is just learning how to love, how to be a kind, gentle-hearted, and open human being, and how you can balance love for yourself and for others.
That is what it truly means to wake up and to become conscious–seeing the beauty and preciousness of it all. To do as Mary Oliver says: “Pay attention, be astonished, tell someone.”
That is what conscious love is about. Two perfectly imperfect individuals creating a perfectly imperfect relationship. Two individual consciousnesses meeting on this physical plane to experience both the “twoness” of meeting and the “oneness” of everything. Two conditions journeying towards the unconditional. Not a tale at all, but an epic drama of awakening into the infinite depths of love.
