Friday, September 20, 2013

Fairytales Are Stressful (And They Are Supposed To Be That Way)


Happily Married!
When I look at my husband, I find it hard to believe that I am actually married to him. We met online (which is the part I really can't believe), met in person (stranger danger!), fell in love (woohoo!), he proposed (I said, "yeah"), we planned a wedding, we are living a marriage. Pinch me, because I must be dreaming. Drew is brilliant and handsome and hardworking and loving and adoring. I am the luckiest girl in the world!

Marriage is a wonderful vocation and I love my husband very much. Amidst all of this love we are going through a lot of change - we moved halfway across the country, we are combining all of our belongings and merging our lifestyles, and we are having to manage our finances as we balance living with what we have and looking forward to the future. It is blissful, but also challenging. I was pondering all of this the other day when I said to him, “I feel like I am in a fairytale . . . a very stressful fairytale.”

Drew’s response to my statement was perfect. He replied, “Aren’t all fairytales stressful?” I had never thought of it that way before! I always hear the phrases “happily ever after” and “fairytale ending,” but the ending isn’t the entire story. For example, (SPOILER ALERT) in my personal favorite, The Little Mermaid, Ariel doesn’t see eye to eye with her father and when she falls in love with a human, things get nasty. She risks swimming into the creepiest cave ever so that an octopus named Ursula can transform her tail into legs in exchange for her voice. So, when she finally gets on land and meets Prince Eric, she can’t actually talk to him. She then has to watch him fall in love with Ursula disguised as Vanessa and she is barely able to stop their marriage. Then Ursula and Prince Eric try really hard to kill each other, Eric wins, and he is able to marry Ariel who was made human by her father, who changed his mind about her loving a human. She then leaves behind everything she is familiar with to be with her husband. I would bet that had it been available to her, Ariel would have spent a lot of time in therapy as a result of all the stress she experienced.

I love that my husband reminded me that even though things are a little bit stressful sometimes, this IS my fairytale. I would much rather go through all of this with him than be all by my lonesome. Who cares about the fairytale ending? Riding off into the sunset – that’s called a vacation; it isn’t real life. We watch and read fairytale stories, following characters through ups and downs and rooting for their success by the end of the story. We wait for THE END. Remember, it’s the WHOLE journey that is important, and that is the fairytale come true.