I’ve started rewatching Bridgerton, anticipating the newest season being released this week. It reminds me of my desperation for a love that we have all fed to believe is real. It is something that we all deserve and will find one day.
Love is a fickle thing. I’m reminded of this daily. The idea and notion of love have been built on the back of history and the patriarchy. Is that a good thing, or is the reason behind its problematic traditions, false promises and utterly unrealistic fairytale endings?
For as long as I can remember, I have spent endless hours in my bedroom fantasising about a love story fit for a movie or a fairytale. I don’t even want to admit how embarrassing it is that I used to play out silly scenarios of boys falling in love with me where I was all parties in these stories, and my closet wall was my kissing partner. In these stories, I told myself someone (outside my family) would finally notice me as the special one, the worthy one, the one to be loved.
The longer this did not happen, the more I grew to accept a completely alternative reality: I was the girl who would never be loved, who would never be picked because I simply was not good enough. It is funny how quick my desire to lean into extremes would become. Something I now have grown such disdain for. I do not like to accept extreme beliefs, but I have only come to terms with this after holding so many differing forms of extremes.
This extremist mindset has manifested in ways such as veganism, immense anger, hatred of men, chocolate addiction, and infatuation with men; you name I have lent into it. My ability to now regret such extreme beliefs has only come through the failures of holding such extreme beliefs. Through these failures, I have learnt that everything falls into the land of the grey area.
You might be wondering what any of this has to do with love. Well, dear reader, I would like to tell you that everything comes back to love.
I have spent 29 years trying to understand my relationship with love. I do not have the answers because I know not of long-term, stable, and healthy love. The healthiest relationship I have to love is the relationship with my sausage dog. Her name is Lucy, and she is a queen. One could even argue that my love, joy, and obsession with this dog is unhealthy. So, what could I possibly have to offer you in the pursuit of understanding love?
Nothing besides the experiences of learning what it is not.
I have learnt that love is not a fairytale and is not quite like the movies. There does not have to be this huge point of contempt and rejection to find love. Love is not an obsession. They are not synonymous.
Real love, I have come to realise, can easily pass you by. The emotions we confuse for love are often so intense, the ones we can barely ignore. We are a society functioning off of our own lived trauma and the generational trauma of the barbaric behaviours of those before us.
Most of us do not know how to identify real, healthy, safe love even if it slapped us in the face (pun cause it would never). Because how could we?
Movies tell us women need a glow-up, men need to pick us, someone always has something to hide, and the happy ending ends when you get the girl. What about the rest of life yet to live?
Dating apps feed into this cycle that there is always someone else, someone new, someone better, that the grass is always greener when the grass is only green where you water it.
Hook-up culture has led us to drown our feelings under the body of another, chasing false intimacy in this disguise of casual sex. That is not to say I am against casual sex; I am not. I am against the way most people use casual sex to fill the void at the expense of others.
I often ask myself, how did we end up here? But then I remember every tiny step that led us to this warped perception of love in our attempts to reject patriarchal traditions and live in the modern world.
I love a love story like the next person. I am utterly obsessed with love. What I am not obsessed with is the environment that has led me to believe in the scarcity mindset. The mindset that has fuelled many, if not all, of my unhealthy extremes. That is a world so ample, so vast, so abundant that you have to be blessed and worthy of a love story, so toxic, so fit for a movie that is now the norm.
Unfortunately, that is not the love I want.
I have spent the better part of my 20s single. I have had relationships here and there, some serious, some not, but I have refused to accept a love like so many have before me. I have refused to accept the bare minimum that has been fed to me as the ideal. The love that means you are often forced to choose harmony over truth, the love that often means as a woman, I will take on the caretaker role, the maid, and the built-in therapist. The love that means I have to lose myself to motherhood, that I have to be the sole person compromising in the pursuit of love, whilst my male romantic partner gets to reap all of the benefits of my labour without any of the burdens.
This kind of love story comes from a scarcity mindset. That there is only a finite amount of breathtakingly worthy love stories in the real world fit for a fairytale. So that ordinary people like you and me have to accept the breadcrumbs instead of holding out for fear that we will not be lucky enough to find the fairytale.
I do not accept that.
I have had a scarcity mindset for all of my life. The belief that the love story that I desire and that I deserve is out there for me is the change of perspective I needed in the countless nights I cried myself to sleep, wishing for someone to love me.
I believe that love stories in the real world can be better than the movies; I think that love stories will forever be this fascinating, unexplainable, uniquely human experience that will never get old. I think there are more remarkable love stories than the fairytales led us to believe when we do the work.
Love is infinite. Your capacity to love grows; there will never be a limited amount. The abundance mindset is that which we should have. That there is a love story fit for a fairytale out there for you if you are ready to see it if you put in the work and we dismantle all of our unhealthy behaviours that have become so normalised and common across the modern world.
I have no doubt opportunities for the love that I desire have presented themselves to me in the past, but I was not ready to receive them. I believe there are more opportunities for the love stories we desire if we choose to see them.
I have wondered, do people think of me as pathetic for being single for so long in my life? That is a beautiful example of the scarcity mindset that I have to be chosen to be worthy.
The abundance mindset recognises that the choice to be single is a worthy one, and it is one more of us that we should choose instead of accepting less than our desires and less than what we deserve. How remarkable and terrifying is it to meet someone willing to refuse to accept what society wants to enforce on them if it does not align with their values?
How abundant do you believe them to be?
The abundance of love that I feel within the main love stories in Bridgerton is what I crave in the real world. I love watching love stories more than anything; they represent what is possible. Should you work to dismantle your unconscious bias towards a scarcity mindset? To think that you will never have a love story quite like the ones we see on TV.
I have no idea if I will ever get my fairytale love story, but I can assure you that I absolutely believe that the next opportunity worthy of the love that I truly desire, I will not let pass me by.
Anything less than that, see you later, I don’t want it.