Love Story

“And I said,
“Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone.
I’ll be waiting; all there’s left to do is run.
You’ll be the prince and I’ll be the princess
It’s a love story… baby just say ‘Yes.’”

 

~Taylor Swift, “Love Story”

I’m in love with being in love.

An active imagination can be the greatest thing in the world, but it also can limit one’s scope of the actual world. The line between what’s fantasy and what’s reality can get blurred and intertwined and you constantly have to remind yourself that this is real life; it’s not a story in a book, or a movie on a silver screen.

 

Nobody ever knows what happened after the Prince married Cinderella and they lived “happily ever after,” or what Sleeping Beauty and her Prince did after he woke her with love’s first kiss and they rode off into the sunset.

That’s not how fairy tales are written.

 

Love stories glorify the idea of love. Nobody wants to hear about how Cinderella and Prince Charming move into their own castle, where she cooks and cleans all over again, this time for her and Charming, and pretty soon she starts having babies. All of a sudden there are new components, like jobs and stress and a new puppy. The Prince finds himself a Royal Xbox and some beer and everybody gets nice and comfortable, settling into married life.

 

They watch TV and attend an occasional Ball with their friends. Flowers and other tokens of affection have long since been replaced by groceries and at-home projects. The stress about the impending new addition to their little family, coupled with pregnancy woes may or may not lessen their sex life.

No, they don’t argue much, and they still love each other desperately, but things might not appear as interesting and romantic after a while.

In REAL LIFE, life goes on, and on.

As a girl who feeds off of the love of love stories, I sometimes have trouble dealing in my mind with the changes that REAL LIFE inevitably brings.

 

If we’re lucky, we get to catch a glimpse of our own real life fairy tale at some point in our lifetime. We get to live out those moments we’ve dreamed of since we were children.

We meet the One, the person who makes our hearts flutter. We find that loving someone so much can almost hurt, but in this wonderful, amazing way. We get to experience a fairy tale romance filled with flowers and promises of forever.

Then there’s a lavish wedding, a day where a girl truly lives out the culmination of her personal fairy tale, dressed in a gauzy white gown, surrounded by friends and family, declaring her forever love to the man of her dreams.

 

So many of us girls get so wrapped up in the idea of the “fairy tale come true.” Then there’re the girls who are so focused on becoming the bride that they never really think about what it means to become a wife. (Thankfully, I don’t consider myself part of that lot, although I know plenty of girls my age who fall into that category.)

 

There’s a part of me that continues to fall in love with my husband more and more each day, and I really do welcome all the changes that are happening in our happy life together.

There’s another part of me that’s hopelessly romantic and yearns for that fairy tale of young love again, that remembers what it was like before “real life” happened to us. I find myself missing those moments where we’d slow dance to nothing at all, hold hands and talk to each other like no one else was in the room.  

 

I’ll admit I get frustrated sometimes. I step outside of this comfortable bubble and scream inside my head “Is this it? Is this all there is? Is this the rest of my life? Is this what happens AFTER the fairy tale?”

I’m not ungrateful. I understand that the only thing is life that’s constant is change. I acknowledge that there are also wonderful things to be said for comfort and stability and the pleasure of knowing someone so well, inside and out.

 

I couldn’t have found someone more suited to me, either. He makes me laugh just when I need laughing. He knows how to calm me when I’m having one of my tirades.

He’s going to be an amazing father and someone I’m going to be proud to sit beside and hold hands with, when we’re both silver-haired in the twilight of our lives.

He’s the perfect puzzle-piece fit to my soul, and I thank God everyday that He’s blessed me with someone so fantastic. My husband’s not perfect, no. But I’ve never been perfect either.

Real life isn’t perfect, but there’s always moments that illuminate those golden threads of fairy tales woven right into the fabric of everyday life for all of us. We just need to look for it.

 

Sometimes it’s so easy to forget that even now, I’m still living my own fairy tale, even though it may be slightly altered from what I always thought. I just need to get my head out of the clouds more and see.

I’m just living in the chapter AFTER Cinderella marries her Prince.