How Disney Movies and Romantic Comedies are Destroying Real Relationships

“Soulmate” - that mythical creature that Disney movies and rom-coms have conditioned women to spend a lifetime searching for.

Fairytales and romantic Hollywood movies are often called “chick flicks”, because their primary purveyors are women.

We sigh and swoon when Prince Charming wakes up the Princess from the evil witch’s curse with the “kiss of true love” and dream about our own soulmate, who will one day sweep us off our feet.

How are girls supposed to identify their soulmate or “one true love” out of the billions on this planet?

Disney princesses have a leg up on us mere mortals when it comes to soulmate identification because when they experience true love’s kiss, they get confirmation (ding ding ding, soulmate alert) by waking up from a curse, sparkles flying from their body, or something else magical happening in true Disney fashion that proves once and for all that Prince Charming is indeed their soulmate.

Some rom-com heroines put Disney princesses to shame by recognizing “the one” just from their voice, like Meg Ryan’s character in Sleepless in Seattle, who flies cross country to meet a man after hearing his voice on the radio, despite being engaged to someone else!

But how can a real girl know if the man she just kissed is her soulmate or not? Sadly, most of us are not in a coma caused by a curse when we kiss someone. So there is no guaranteed way to know if we just experienced true love’s kiss or a regular one.

The unavailability of evil witches capable of casting coma-inducing curses these days leaves real girls with a lot of uncertainty in figuring out who their one true love is. They instead have to be mindful of very subtle signs like the feeling of long-term familiarity towards someone they just met, strong sexual chemistry, love at first sight, and worst of all, gut feeling or intuition. Are we supposed to leave the most important decision of our lives to something as unreliable and vague as gut feeling?!

Companies like Tesla are focused on making self-driving cars, rather than the much more necessary “soulmate identifier” - what a waste?! Imagine the millions they could've made with such an invention!

As a result, many women go through life constantly second guessing their relationships and are unable to resist looking over their shoulder and checking their gut to see if any strong feelings arise for anyone else.

After all, you would never be having this fight with your husband if he were “the one,” because soulmates don’t need words to understand each other. You having to finish your own sentences can only mean one thing - he’s not your true love! Even though your boyfriend is a great guy, why is there no wow factor in the bedroom? Because he’s not “the one”! Dump him and keep looking till you find Mr. Right.

Of course, naysayers will tell you to “work” on your relationship instead of breaking up. That’s because they don’t know that when you are in a soulmate relationship, everything is perfect - you get them, they get you, you have amazing sex, never fight, and live in complete bliss every day. And what is the whole point of working on this relationship anyway if he’s not the one? He can never make you happy and blissful as your soulmate will. Every second you waste trying to make this relationship work is one less second you could be spending with your one true love.

The Unrealistic Expectations of "Happily Ever After"

Have you ever noticed how all Disney movies and most romcoms and romance novels end as soon as the soulmate couple get married or end up together, often with this statement - “And they lived happily ever after”? This is no coincidence. If we start questioning how soulmates handle everyday disagreements, then it becomes harder to keep this illusion alive.

Do soulmates ever fight? Do they ever have sex that is less than earth-shattering?

What happens when Prince Charming leaves his dirty laundry on the floor, driving Snow White crazy? What if Sleeping Beauty wants to move to Paris while her Prince prefers to live in New York? What is stopping Meg Ryan in “Sleepless in Seattle” from leaving Tom Hanks and going after another guy she feels a stronger connection to on radio the next time? By ending the movie with “happily ever after”, questions like these never get addressed and we assume that the soulmate couple live in perfect and complete bliss for the rest of their lives. It’s high time we ladies saw through this ploy that keeps us running after a pipe dream.

How would our lives be different if we didn’t believe in soulmates?

Unfortunately, real life is not a fairytale. Real girls cannot identify a pea under a dozen mattresses or grow hair long enough to use as a rope to escape from a castle.

Just like none of us can ever be as perfect as a Disney princess, no real man can ever live up to the image of Prince Charming we see in movies, or worse, the one we have built up in our minds.

Things are not always picture perfect in real life. Just because you don’t experience “love at first sight” when you meet someone or if the first sexual encounter is awkward, don’t pull the plug and give up on the relationship.

If we don't believe in the unrealistic fairytale expectations, instead of giving up on a boyfriend or husband for lack of proof that he is our soulmate, we would work on making the relationship better and open ourselves to the possibility of a wonderful and fulfilling relationship with this person. So ladies, don’t set your relationship up for failure before it even starts by putting your man through the soulmate test.

True love in real life takes a lot of work, sacrifice, and compromise. You will disagree and fight. He will not have mind-reading powers, so just tell him what you want.

Let’s keep fiction where it belongs, on the screen or pages of a book, and give our men a level playing field where they don’t have to compete with a figment of our imagination for our love.