The Fairy Tale

Kissing a lot of frogs to get to your Prince Charming? Keep kissing...this may take a while. Or is there a better way?

Growing up I thought love was something in between "The Young and the Restless" and all my grandmother's romantic magazines. Oh, and don't forget all the "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty" stories every little girl is fed an unhealthy diet of. As a teenager, it was the Harlequin romance novels we passed around school that influenced me most. I think after all of that conditioning any man may have had a hard time living up to my skewed expectations.

If that weren't enough, love was kind of a weird thing around my house, dysfunctional at best. Let's face it, when a five letter word beginning with 'b' and ending in 'h' becomes your pet name and a way of showing affection, you have to know something isn't right. But having become proficient in what love isn't, I feel it is time to move on to what love is.

Have I gotten any closer to the answer? Sometimes I think I have. And, other times, it feels like nothing more than imagination at its best. Some nice fantasy to distract you from the cold, hard reality of life. If it is real then it is very elusive. I suppose this is the skeptic in me coming out of the closet. If love is out there, I challenge it to find me, to prove its existence. If it is all around us then it shouldn't be so hard to find.

Of course, I am speaking about human love now. Divine love seems to be a given, at least for me. We could not be here without it. Maybe the problem lies not in the existence of love, but in the interpretation of it. What if knowing love depends on our awareness of it? How do you get to know true love?

It is said to get more love, you have to give more love. This makes me frown. I give love every day in every way I can. Am I missing an ingredient? Is there something more to it than this? Most of my adult life has been spent taking care of others mostly at my own expense so I had to learn about self-love. If you have never had a problem loving yourself, you have no idea how incredibly hard it is to start. Everyone suddenly becomes your enemy because who are you to put yourself first? It's been a bit of a challenge.

Once I overcame that obstacle to some degree, others came to take its place. I have to tell you, some days it appears like the whole world is conspiring against me. I take ten steps forward and slide back twenty. These are the days when I am either in a ball on the floor crying for mercy or throwing my hands up in the air in a temper tantrum that would make any two-year-old look like an angel.

This is where I'm at on my path, kicking and screaming most of the way. On my good days, I really want to believe in knights in shining armor on white horses, but how practical is that? If I did see one charging down the streets of Philadelphia, I'd more than likely run in the other direction. On my bad days, i would like to burn every fairy tale ever printed. Where am I at on that scale today? Stuck somewhere in the middle wanting to believe but finding many more reasons not to. So is there a better way? I'm really not sure. I'll have to get back to you on that.