You heard the old story about the frog who was nestled in a pot of water and then the heat gets turned up on the pot slowly. We all know what happened to that poor little frog before he realized it. This is a good analogy to the things that I believe have brought us to the point that true love evades us. Follow along with me and let me walk you through my thought process.
I wish I could point to just one or two things that brought us to the point that love is difficult to find and keep. I wish I could point to just a few reasons that people often just throw love away. It is not a few things. It is a series of things.
For today, I am just going to focus on a couple. I am going to start with Cinderella and all the other Disney Princesses. With Disney being in the hot seat right now, I might as well just pile it on. I can lump in many Hollywood movies from the 1940 and 1950s for good measure.
Movies began programming us to believe that love must be incredibly romantic to count to and really be true love. I believe that Disney coined the phrase, “True Love” and “Happily Ever After”. We drank the Kool-Aid girls! I know a few men who drank it, too.
My oldest daughter Jessica was the Disney Princess Junkie. She had every Disney Princess outfit that was available and for those that weren’t, she would have me sew her one. I made her a Jasmine and Ariel costume for two separate Halloweens. Not only did we have every single Disney Storybook known to man, but we also had the movies on VCR (that ages me) and the movies could be played repeatedly…and they were. Jessie had every line memorized and could sing every song. And she did.
One night when Jessica was about 5 years old, I read her Cinderella…again. When I had finished the book, I closed it, placed it on the nightstand and looked at her and said, “You know, Cinderella was an idiot. She danced with Prince Charming a couple of times and then they got engaged and married. She was looking for someone to rescue her from her evil stepmother and stepsisters. That is not how people fall in love.” Jessica looked up at me with her big green eyes, pursed her lips and with a stern look on her face, she fired back, “Do you always have to suck the fun out of every book?” I kissed her on the forehead, turned off the light and had the last word, “That is my job sweetie.”
Unbeknownst to us all, this was the beginning of our mental programming that set us to be dissatisfied in our relationships and to expect some type of magical bolt of lightning to strike our heart. We believed that level of lusty love would last FOREVER!
There are times that two people meet and there is an instant physical attraction and then there is a great deal of interest in common, similar lifestyle, upbringing, and spirituality that can bridge beyond just the physical into a long-lasting love story. If you believe that this is common, I am sorry to be the one to pop your bubble. There is a reason that there are no sequels to Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the others. Real life happens and this is where true love is forged and tested.
My mother-in-law was a romance movie junkie: Casablanca, Some Like It Hot, Meet Me in St. Louis, An Affair to Remember. You name it, she watched it. In her later years, she binged watched romance movies from the 1940s and 1950s. The handsome male stars and sexy bomb-shell actresses of Hollywood were enacting highly emotional, dramatic relationships on the big screen.
Frankly, most of the relationships that were depicted in these 1940 and 1950 movies had the maturity of middle school children and were highly dysfunctional. Interestingly, my mother also liked watching these movies. Something that both women had in common was they created dramatic scenes in their relationships like running into the bedroom, slamming the bedroom door, and flinging themselves on the bed and sobbing. Another scene was throwing glasses and plates. And what about slapping people across the face. Where did they learn this stuff? My grandmother would have put my mother over her knee and spanked the daylights out of her behind if she did that at her home. So, my mom didn’t learn that from her.
In talking to many of my friends, their mothers also had a high level of immaturity in their relationship with their husbands and even their children. Is there a direct correlation between these movies and this behavior? I think there is a high probability that it was a large part of the influence. Someone should write a thesis on the subject.
Movies create mental programming which creates beliefs. These beliefs then create our attitudes. Our attitudes in turn create feelings. Our feelings determine our actions. Isn’t it interesting that they are called “television programs?”
Each generation of movie and television viewers have had their own programming. I want you to think for a moment about the one’s that influenced your beliefs about love and relationships. These were not just for entertainment. They forged in the minds of our society some of the greatest lies about relationship between men and women. I know! I am sucking the fun out your favorite movie like The Notebook. Nicholas Sparks’ novel had some truth about working hard on a marriage. But let me point out that Ally and Noah started out as affair that broke the heart of two other people. Ally was engaged to another man and Noah was seeing the war widow. Notice we never hear about these two people again in the movie. It is seriously downplayed.
Let me define what I believe is true love: You can achieve true love when you place your partner above all other except for God. You put your relationship above yourselves as individuals. You raise each other up, celebrate each other’s uniqueness, and support each other. You can always count on your partner to be there. Your intent each day is ask yourself one question: “What can I do to make my partner’s life better today?” True love seeks to understand your partner’s thoughts and feeling before you impose yours upon them. True love knows that there will be hard times in life and each partner will need to fight through these together. True love requires gladiators, not spectators.
Everyone can have True Love because EVERTHING to get true love is actionable except for physical attraction.
Come with me and peel back the curtain and look at some of the other things that have influenced how we got to where we are today. You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge. You can’t acknowledge what you don’t know. You can’t know what you don’t explore. Let’s keep exploring together.
Please share my blog on your Facebook Page or Linkedin if you like it. You can also like and comment and share your ideas. We are on this journey together. I also am exploring our history for the truth.
God Bless, Jeannine Kaiser Wolfe
