Who is to blame: how romantic relationships ruin our personal life

From now on, it is fashionable to expose fairy tales: psychologists dissect Sleeping Beauty and stigmatize Snow White. Apparently, fairy tales show girls an unrealistic model of relationships with the opposite sex. All fairy-tale heroines are busy waiting (sometimes even in a coma, as in the case of Sleeping Beauty or Snow White). The prince is responsible for all activity. Simply put, the girls are encouraged to grow up as beautiful, weak-willed creatures who must sit still until the long-awaited figure of a horse looms on the horizon.

Although it seems to me that the root of female neuroses associated with relationships should not be sought in fairy tales.

Think Prince. Who cares about the prince! Here he is just as good, correct (he even has a white horse, but, say, not in apples or black). The prince arrived, won, kissed her chastely on the lips and married. It’s after a kiss! Nerd.

In fact, there are many princes around. Each girl met a prince: a polite young man in a checkered sweater, with whom she went to the museum out of pity or boredom; the director of the course, who for five years took her to the institute for free in her father’s car; neighbor’s cousin, who, blushing, invited him to come and encourage him in the sambo competition. Ready princes: gallant, reliable, amorous.

But for some reason, the girls remain indifferent to these boring handsome young men in all respects. Because girls don’t borrow their romantic notions from fairy tales. Everything is much worse…

I read my first love story when I was 13. It was immediately followed by the second, third, thirtieth, one hundred and twenty-ninth… On the covers of these paperbacks passionate muscular men hugged luxurious women with full breasts. on waterfall background. Or the beach. Or a palace.

Despite the fact that the characters’ names and their appearance changed with each novel, their characters were surprisingly similar. So, in each novel, the main character was distinguished by modesty, justice and chastity. The main character, on the contrary, behaved boldly, rudely, frankly. Halfway through the novel, we discovered that he had a good heart, he was just stupid, hiding his feelings behind a high wall of feigned indifference. By the end of the novel, the main character’s kindness and innocent sensuality jumped over that wall, and now the hero has exclaimed in a sexy tenor, “I’ve never experienced this with any woman!” You completely changed me!”

It wasn’t until ten years later that I began to think that the behavior of the men in these novels was, to say the least, odd.

Here, for example, is how one of the novels I read began.

The main character – a modest and chaste girl – wakes up to the fact that someone noisily breaks down the door to her modest, fair and chaste apartment. Putting on a silk dressing gown, she goes to open it (i.e., she does the last thing a big-city dweller would do if her apartment was banged around loudly).

On the threshold, the young girl discovers a sensual and angry stranger: his impudent gaze roughly surveys the chiseled silhouette of the young girl. The stranger declares bluntly: “Damn!” Our heroine is speechless in the face of such direct rudeness. She completely loses it, because on the next ten pages, we see how a stranger collects the heroine’s belongings (!), takes her to the airport (!!) and relocates her in a private plane to her Italian villa (!!!).

That is, neither when collecting a suitcase, nor when traveling to the airport, nor on a multi-hour flight to Sicily, the gift of speech does not go to the heroine. In addition, the loss of speech is exacerbated, although the stranger continues to remind the girl during the trip that she is a “whore” and even “with an ordinary appearance”.

When a romance begins between a rude stranger and a modest heroine around page 123 (and the stranger is understood to hide his feelings behind a high wall of feigned indifference), it turns out that the stranger has entered the heroine’s apartment not like that, but to find her neighbor who broke her brother’s heart.

Well, who cares about the details at this point. And also the fact that at the end of the novel the heroine goes to the crown in a family wedding dress just two weeks after a serious fracture in her leg (she was hit by a truck while trying to running away from a stranger during another quarrel). Apparently, she also loaned the family crutches.

I was reading a novel with a flashlight under the covers and I thought, “Wow! It’s here! This is what love should be! Millions of girls, reading, thought the same thing.

And then the girls grew up. And contacted the most selective idiots the earth has ever borne. With idiots who laughed at them, insulted them, made them feel stupid, ugly and canceled meetings at the last moment. In general, the spitting image of the hero of a love story in its infancy (minus a private jet and a villa in Italy).

As soon as a girl who grew up on novels meets a rude, rude man, her head snaps, “It’s him!” He can’t really just be a boor and an idiot! Surely he has a good and beating heart!

By the time it turns out that yes, he really can be just a boor and an idiot, a lot of time has passed. The most romantic girls last for years. Periodically, it seems to them that a little more and their boorish idiot will finally turn into the hero of the novel and say the long-awaited: “I have never experienced this, you have completely changed me!” But instead he says, “Did you buy a beer?” Well, go buy what you spread your ass on the couch.

Then the plot develops in different ways. Many people prefer to check louts for lice all their life, not losing hope that someday they will meet the hero of the novel.

The others pay attention to this same annoying prince. And finally, they live happily ever after.