A Game of "Hearts" : The Cinderella Story

Once upon a time, girl meets guy and they fall in love. They ate together, laughed together, cried together and planned their futures together. Cinderella and Prince Charming had nothing on this modern day fairytale.  Unlike Cinderella however, this fairytale came to a bitter end as the stained glass windows we created shattered as soon as the rocks from the world were thrown. As I and many other woman around the world quickly discover it is impossible for a happily ever after to occur without a few hiccups along the way. Suddenly, single life was created and everything around became a game of hearts.


Though the concept of a "fairytale" still baffles me. Given the stereotypes and the many baggages we carry around today it makes me wonder what would happen if they made a part two to this fairytale...you know a behind the scenes "reality show" of what it was like in the castle. In fact I believe that Prince and Cinderella got married under such unrealistic circumstances of attraction they perhaps went to bed nightly wrapped in the sheets of the "woulda, coulda, shoulda" syndrome. "Maybe I should have had another ball to search for her"... "It would have been so much better if didn't marry royalty, what a snob he turned out to be"..."I could have accomplished so much more if I had waited".....


Do you think that there is a Prince Charming searching high and low just to find you? Refusing to dance with the other eligible women in the village with the hope of one day finding you? Simply refusing to date around because you are out there? I think not.

Cinderella so young, so naive, so locked away from men perhaps just saw the opportunity of a romantic love affair with a wealthy handsome Prince as a way of escaping her sad reality. Just like every other woman, she too had a dream of romantic bliss and the longing for her "rags to riches" story. Were the delusions of the perfect man enough to create a happily ever after with a handsome stranger? Too many women have this syndrome. Perhaps we don't want the "rags to riches" story but we meet a man and our delusions of what we want him to be cause us to somehow make this a "reality". We see what we want to see and find it impossible to see the obvious signs that he isn't the right guy for us. Elizabeth Gilbert said it best in her book Eat, Pray, Love- "In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place."   This epitomizes what I like to call "The Cinderella Syndrome".  We create a Prince Charming of our own criterion and when he fails- because he will-  to meet the expectations of our delusions we end up devastated. 


To master the game of hearts in the real world, we must unveil the flowery imageries we create about what we want our men to be like and see them for who they really are... Beer drinking, sports loving, hairy creatures...Still worth planning your happily ever after with? Or was it just an illusion we so desperately wanted to be real?