Where’s My Happily Ever After? The Rise in Unrealistic Relationship Goals

Do you ever wonder about this? Do you wonder how you ended up in the life you are in right now, where things just haven’t turned out the way you thought they would? That your marriage is not how you dreamt it would be back when you were young, free and single. Do you reflect on your life and wonder what happened to being with the man of my dreams? What happened to being swept off my feet and saved by my Prince Charming? What happened to my aspirations of living with a great family life where the love for my husband effortlessly grows and blossoms every day? Why aren’t I living happily ever after? Do you then start to wonder that perhaps because your life isn’t like this, that maybe, just maybe, you’re not with the right person and perhaps you should separate so that you can start again and try and have that perfect, blissful marriage
with someone else?
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From the moment we’re old enough to understand fairy tales, we are sold a Disney fantasy of how life should and will turn out for us eventually. We will struggle, and then miraculously our Prince Charming will come along and save us. And we will live happily ever after.

As we grow up, we continue to be surrounded by movies and books that sell us the idea of a perfect romance and a perfect relationship that we all then end up aspiring to. And then when we do get married, we naturally start comparing our own marriage to this perfect standard. Unfortunately, as our marriage matures, what then can and does happen is that we grow bitter and resentful that the man we have at home, no longer looks like the man of our dreams and is not similar in any way, shape or form to the image of the man that we are consistently exposed to and which is being sold to us as the ‘ideal’. We may all too often sit there, silently judging our spouse for not living up to the perfect standard that has been subconsciously indoctrinated into us from such a young age.
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But what are we really comparing our husbands to? We’re comparing them to something that does not exist..

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