Princeless Princess

Just like every girl I’ve ever known, I grew up indulged in the fairytale classics. I would put on my dress-up gowns, and a tiara, believing I was a princess, rewinding my Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and Snow White VHS tapes until I knew them word for word.

Even at three years old, I believed I would have my own Prince Charming come sweep me off my feet to go live happily ever after.

As childhood turned to adolescence, my role models changed with me. Cinderella and Ariel were replaced by Brittany Spears, and Beyonce. Fairytales were replaced with t.v shows such as the O.C and One Tree Hill.

The values of love I was taught here were no less warped. Everyone my age believed that having a boyfriend made a girl cooler, happier, and therefore a better person. Everywhere I looked in popular culture, I was being taught that I need to find my other half, and our love would fill every hole that I had in my life. My search began.

At the age of 18, I found my Prince Charming, and if he was one thing, it was definitely a charmer. We fell madly in love, and soon moved in together, planning our future with only each other in mind. Is this the where I’m supposed to say we lived happily ever after?

Unfortunately, we never heard the real endings to our childhood fairytales. Cinderella divorced the prince, Ariel grew tired of life on land, leaving for the sea, and we all know what happened to Brittany and K-Fed.

Life doesn’t end in happily ever after. We will always have our trials, arguments, bills, tears, and raw emotion that cannot be scripted. If not, then we aren’t really living at all.

After two years of living with my own prince, things began to change. Our long talks turned to long arguments, promises to love forever, turned to threats to leave, and eventually we found ourselves living in a relationship without happiness. Our love had slipped out from under us, and we didn’t know where it went. How could a love that was once so strong burn out as easily as a candle?

After deciding to end our relationship, I sunk into a dark and dreary state. It felt like my whole life and future had been destroyed, and I didn’t know where to turn to next. I had lost contact with many friends and family, and found myself the loneliest I had ever been. It wasn’t until I held all the broken pieces of what I had called a life in my hands that I began to put them back together.

I was searching for love in all the wrong places. I was looking for the prince to fill every void in my life, thinking he would be my happiness. It was then I realized that we can never truly love someone until we love ourselves, and are complete individually. We are responsible for our own happiness, and the only person we should ever truly depend on is ourselves. If we cannot find what we are looking for in ourselves, than we cannot expect to find it in someone else.

Even recent teenage based films such as Twilight, and High School Musical, and musicians such as Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus aim their attention towards the opposite sex, highlighting the idea of being saved by them, and sending a false impression of living ‘happily ever after’. It is no wonder adults believe that young people don’t know anything about love, with media sources feeding this false representation of happiness, we are doomed to learn only by experience. In life, we go through pain for a reason – to learn.

If times were to change, and teenage girls focused on achieving personal success, and self-worth, they will find themselves gaining a sense of happiness that no man can give them.