Ditching "Happily Ever After"

Addie, a three year-old girl that I babysit, recently feel in love with the movie Enchanted: a Disney fairy-tail about a princess who escapes her cartoon form, enters the 'real world', falls in love, and ends up living happily ever after. The movie opens with the main character, Giselle, singing as her bird friends fly to her window. One day, after Addie had watched Enchanted continuously for a week, she ran down from her room, hysterical. When her mom asked what was wrong, Addie, through tears, answered, "I sang and the birds didn't come flying to my window!"

Although as we age, we don't respond as dramatically as Addie did when "fairy-tails" don't come true in our lives, we still experience disappointment. We live in a culture where we are constantly bombarded with the notion that fantasies, grown-up fairy-tails, are realistic. But unfortunately, these fantasies are what they are: unattainable lives of perfection. Fantasies are not destructive when they are viewed as such; in many cases they can be stress relievers and vacations from the real world. It is when we start to see fantasies as normal and realistic that we set ourselves up for discontent and unhappiness.

For instance, many of the women of Jennifer Maher's article, "What Do Women Watch?," revel in the pleasure of watching "reality TV" on TLC because of the content they feel when they see that "perfect love and happiness" is possible. And then, when these women discover that the "real romantic life is not as exciting as the televised narrative," they begin the painful and destructive cycle of watching fantasies that evoke the same romantic emotions and continually becoming discontent with the lack of perfection in their lives (Maher 90).

These fantasies we are bombarded with not only inevitably lead us to dissatisfaction and unhappiness if we understand them as realistic. They also serve to cause us to objectify other people of this world. In his article, "Picture Perfect," Douglas Rushkoff shares that after relving in the fantasies that the American media had overwhelmed him with, he looked for a partner of perfection. But he recognized the problem with this: human's aren't perfect. He wasen't relating to these potential partners as real people; he was relating to them as objects...potential trophy wives. He reflects that, "Looking at a potential romantic partner through a lens like this (one that demanded perfection) was doomed to failure."

So what are we to do in a world that falsely brainwashes us into thinking that "happily ever after" is a reachable ideal? Rushkoff writes that he has "found 'the one.' precisely because she's the one who's forced [him] to realize there's no such thing." He ditched the scripts that demanded that he find perfection. In other words, to be truly HAPPY, we must grow up and ironically realize that "HAPPILY ever after" is truly a fantasy: it doesn't exist in our world.