Altering My Disney Beliefs

I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept of ‘happily ever after’.  May be it has to do with my love for all things Disney.  I may be 41 but I’m all about the magic of the Magic Kingdom and always have been but as a starry eyed little girl particularly so.  Those princesses?  I wanted to be one.  And those princes on their white steeds?  I wanted to have one of them too (the prince, not necessarily the horse although I had once asked my father for a pony for my birthday.  He gave me an odd look and asked where I planned to keep it.  I responded, ‘in my bedroom’.  That made perfect sense to me).  I wanted it all at one point and really rather expected it.  I thought that once the ‘…and they lived happily ever after’ happened at the end credits, the romance remained as alive 50 years in the future than at that very moment as the  happy couple rides off into the sunset surrounded by singing birds, fluffy tailed rabbits and galloping deer. 

**Note:  I’ve probably written about this in the past somewhere amongst my 5000 entries.  Sorry for the redundancy but I believe this is a subject of enough importance that it’s worth writing again.  Besides who in the world is liable to go back to try to even look for that blog anyhow? **

I know you’re visualizing the galloping deer, right?  But no matter, the point is, those were the visions I had.  And because I was just that naïve, I expected all this and more to come true.  I strongly believed that the man I was going to live with forever and I, would never fight, that we would never disagree, argue, go to bed mad and that at the end of the day unicorns would be pooping sunshine and rainbows all around us.  That’s just how green I really was. 

The reality, as most of you are well aware, is vastly different.  I’m not going to go into what precisely those are, they are too tedious and I’m not that patient (not to mention this blog in itself is rather redundant, any more redundancy and I’ll be shamed into closing my blog forever).   I just ask for those of you who are married to please relay the truth to your desperately seeking to get hitched single-counterparts about what marriage is really about (oh and this excluded those of you who have been married for a hot second.  Y’all are still in the honeymoon phase so shush up and enjoy).  It’s not fair that just because you feel there’s more solidarity in numbers that you’re going to lead the ignorant astray.  And as for you single folks, use your brains.  Just think about it this way:  you take two individuals; give them a piece of paper that states they’re now husband and wife while basically proclaiming how ‘you got to live with each other UNTIL YOU DIE’ (and that too living in the same space).   

This here in itself is basically a set-up for failure…and an epic one at that.  I mean who can win in this situation?  If you’re thrown into jail, you’re not gonna feel great about it, are you?  And marriage (at least the way it’s stated generally speaking) seems like nothing but bars that holds a person in and restricts them from doing anything ever again…until they die.

So right…back to happily ever after.  This denotes needing to find someone to share it with.  That’s the key to it, I suppose.  I personally went through my youth trying to figure out what that person would be like, particularly before taking the walk down the aisle myself.  It was all a big jumble of Prince Charming mixed in with the three members of A-ha and even some Tom Cruise (whom I j’adored at that time but now not so much) thrown in for good measure.  As time went by and I grew up, I realized may be some of these folks were just too unattainable or their characteristics.  After all celebrities were celebrities for a purpose, a reason and that meant they were special.  I looked around and realized that I wasn’t precisely surrounded with this particular brand of special, at least not the boys I knew.   Still I held onto the hope that Prince Charming would find me. That wasn’t asking for too much, right?

I guess you could say he did but it didn’t take long to realize that PC (“Prince Charming”) was actually a real man with a temper, bad mannerisms sometimes, a not so great attitude a lot and who farted in bed.  Okay I’m not trying to call anyone out but all you women know for a fact that the man you were dating and who romanced you to the hilt, dressed and smelled nice at all times and who threw flowery phrases at you at the drop of a mere hat somehow managed to morph into but a shadow of that alter ego as soon as they put that blasted wedding band on your ring finger.  Often times you are suddenly faced with a selfish, snarly, negative, lazy buggar who you want to drown in a glass of water or spork in the jugular.  Not that I’m saying I’ve wanted to do any of these things…*ahem* 

Don’t be outraged, guys, I’m well aware that women are way worse.  Before, we were the supportive, loving, cool, laidback females who would give you shoulder rubs and baby you, even gleefully putting up with all your nonsense as well as your dumb escapades because we were trying to achieve our happily ever after (this was usually because we didn’t want to be the only person amongst our girlfriends who was single or the last to take that big leap and then throw a dash of biological clock a-tickin’ and you certainly have one cray cray party of one on your hands).  After the ring is slipped onto our finger?  Oh we become something else…and I don’t mean this in a positive way at all.  In one fell swoop we take on the roles of wife, mother, aunt, caretaker, bread winner, home maker, psychologist, cheerleader, sexual deviant, blah blah blah…the list is endless.  And that is all to one person…your significant other.  Never mind the others who vie for your attention (taking out the role of sexual deviant of course).    All this in a nutshell is exhausting and we end up morphing into sufficiently horrible crabby negative harping shrews.

End product?   I’ve come to realize that there is no such thing as happily ever after.  Rather I now believe in ‘happy for now’.  It’s a fairly simplistic concept, doesn’t demand much and most certainly it’s not overtly reaching.  If you think to yourself, I’m happy…now, then I believe that’s the real recipe to your own happy ending (shut up Smut, you know what sort I’m talking about).   I won’t lie, it was nearly impossible for me to do this until most recently.  Like the a-typical woman I think far into the future, weighing consequences and possible outcomes.  I never used to take a step in any direction without writing out a pro and con list and even then I would get the view point of no less than 10 people to see what they would think.  Can you say ‘indecisive’?  But no, I wasn’t indecisive now that I think about it, more like cautious.  That’s definitely the word.  I’ve lived my life cautiously and now…at the age of 41…I’m ready to stop.

No, there is no such thing as a PC coming in to sweep you off your feet, one who also happens to have a sword which they can take on the world for you and therefore slay all your dragons.  No, there is no such real thing as happily ever after.  Yes, there is a palpable concept called ‘true love’ but the problem is that it’s interrupted with another thing called ‘life’ and life, Folks, kills love slowly, painfully until it’s snuffed.  Reality smashes it to bits before you can blink an eye, even before you can attempt to save it.  And when it does, at one point we look back to what we had at one time and become angry and frustrated, wondering why we couldn’t have had that again. 

The reason you can’t is because at that time, that was your happiness…then.  For that moment in time you were meant to be happy and things were meant to be simpatico and once that time had passed, it passed.  There is no going back.   And moving forward?  Stop thinking about that past.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t remember the past with fondness, sure go for it, that’s yours to cherish and hold close.  But stop holding your future up to the specter of that past.  I’m sorry to be harsh about it, Cupcake, but none of us were born with a notarized statement of life asserting we are guaranteed that unicorn which pooped sunshine and rainbows.  In fact, if you’re smart after the first time you fell and scrapped your knee, you should have known that it ain’t gonna get much better.  I’m not being fatalistic, I’m being realistic, know the difference.

Okay, so my two cents are here.  Right now, happily ever after has been replaced with happy for now.  I’m okay with that.  I sound like I’m settling, doesn’t it?  Well you know what?  Been there, done that, and the disappointment is always rather heartbreaking.  I now take it for what it is, the moment.  That, Friends, is above all the most important thing.  There are some things you can control, you can plan for, like your degree or career and even those get derailed and pitfalls present themselves on the way.  But something as big as expecting happiness to surround you in a glow forever?  Nope, not happening.  And since I don’t believe in reincarnation, I got this one life to live.  That’s it.  This is the end all and be all.  So if I know this, and I do not know when it will be taken from me, why then should I waste my time in not only assuming I will be happy forever but then becoming embittered when I realize in fact it won’t?  Seems silly to me.  I rather live for that second that I’m presently breathing in, take that and put that in my memory bank and accept that may be I will never experience that feeling again. 

 You may call me ‘happy for now, Rubes’.  This is all I’m aiming to be from here on out.  And I suggest you decide to copy me as well.  It’s liberating.