Shit happens… but so do fairytales
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt inclined to write a Valentine’s blog post in my life. And after writing hardly anything at all in the past few months (another story for another time) this was definitely not what I expected to come back with… but here we are!
Back in the early days of Facebook I joined a group ‘Disney gave me unrealistic expectations about love’. I’m also fairly sure Disney didn’t do a huge amount in the positive female role models department, but thankfully there were plenty of other ways in childhood that I got my feminist fix.
So now we’re here, a decade or so on, and I find myself filled with guilt as my daughter sits there and enjoys Cinderella & Sleeping Beauty for the bzillionth time (interspersed with a good dose of Moana & Frozen so I don’t feel quite so bad!)
At the end of the day there might be a hefty scoop of guilt about the kind of messages she’s getting from these movies, but there is also massive scoop of enjoyment on top… I can’t help but love all things Disney even though I know there’s plenty if reasons not to.
And besides our movie watching is always accompanied by a running mummy commentary to help my daughter develop more balanced view of life (“Really? They lived in a remote cottage for 16 years, with a growing child, without ever baking or sewing??? It’s not like they could nip to Tesco for a loaf of bread and a pair of knickers!”)
Anyway hubby and I don’t really do Valentines Day on account of it being the same week as his birthday (don’t want to peak too soon!) and also that we’re quite capable of telling each other we love each other without being promoted by a marketing campaign.
Saying that there are usually a plethora of funny/rude/clever cards doing the rounds at the time so we usually end up exchanging those to give each other a giggle.
(Note: If you are someone that goes all in on V-Day I am not judging at all… we all get our fun in different ways, and god knows I’m a sucker for marketing hype in plenty of other areas of life, so if it makes you feel good then why shouldn’t you make the most of all things red, pink and flowery today!!!)
This year I almost didn’t buy this card thanks to the coach voice in my head saying “If you buy this you’re only reinforcing negative beliefs” (my coach voice can be FAR FAR FAR too serious and intense sometimes!) thankfully the irreverent voice has got far stronger in recent years and replied with “Why don’t you fuck off and get a sense of humour”.
Yesterday morning I woke up knowing I couldn’t possible give hubby this card without a lottery ticket inside… but if I was going to do that the numbers needed to be meaningful, and one of them should be the date we first met (online… oh yes we are a digital era success story — more of that later) so I went hunting for our first messages, which I’d diligently saved when I shut down my online dating account.
Now before I dive into the next part of this story I need to give you a little background to my love life pre-hubby.
I met hubby when I was 27, a whole 14 years after my first foray into the dating world. My first boyfriend only lasted a week — his love Everton FC and Hornby Trains were the nail in the coffin. The latter is most surprising as I’m sure I’ve always loved a good train set, as a toddler my grandma always struggled to drag me away from the Brio set in the Early Learning Centre and I’ve now made up for it by making sure my daughter has more Brio train track than anyone could ever need. I digress.
Between the ages of 16–20 I spent most of my time in a series of three relationships. Considering my self esteem could be a rock bottom I’m quite surprised that anyone was attracted to me while I was so busy hating myself (which is why I think the whole ‘You have to love yourself before anyone else can’ is a pile of bollocks, turns out other people can love you even when one of your hobbies is looking in the mirror and hurling abuse at yourself). Anyway I think it’s fair to say that those early relationships had plenty of passion, but far too many arguments and drama (and I take my share of responsibility for that!)
Then came the years where the most fun I had was an on and off ‘friends with benefits’ relationship, because it was the moments in between that I seemed to be attracted to people who didn’t like me nearly as much as I liked them. When it came to love my early twenties were far more heartache then enjoyment.
By the time I hit 27 I was done with it all. I had one of those turning point moments, where I realised that the time I spent by myself was far more enjoyable than the time I spent trying to persuade someone they might want to be in a relationship with me(which it turns out really hurts when there’s someone in your life who you totally hit it off with on a soul mate level and even they won’t jump in with both feet). I’d been online dating for a few years by that point, and I wasn’t quite ready to give up all hope, but I was damn sure that I wasn’t going on another date unless the person in question was more interested in having fun with me than messing me around.
I updated my dating profile to be far more honest, in a ‘here’s my good bits and bad bits and if that scares you off then you’re not right for me’ kind of way. And then I logged off and got on with enjoying life solo.
And then a few months later I got a message from a guy. Not my future husband. Just someone who’d bothered to trawl inactive profiles and wanted to see if I was interested.
I wasn’t.
However it reading that message changed my profile to ‘active within 24 hours’.
The next day my hubby-to-be joined okcupid. He’d never done online dating before. He filled out a profile and a bunch of questions and it suggested three women, who had logged on recently, that he might want to take a look at.
He picked the one he liked the sound of most and sent her a message.
That was me.
We spent the next three days sending each other far more emails than Dating 101 would ever recommend (we burned that book before we met in person and replaced it with our own version — Dating 102.5 — the anti-rules book for the socially awkward and eccentric dater).
On day 4 we met.
Two days later I knew his pin number and before the week was out we were in no doubt that this was IT. We’d both found ‘the one’.
By the end of the month we’d met each others families and he’d pretty much moved in to my place.
Which brings me back to yesterday, when I hunted down that first message so I could use it for the lottery ticket.
I found the message and started reading. And fell down a rabbit hole of funny, silly and romantic memories.
I had been so caught up in life that I managed to forget the fairytale start I’d had in my own relationship. Seriously, if I’d heard our story before we met, read the messages we exchanged and got a feel for the connection we developed within moments, I would hold it up as the perfect example of what I dreamed and hoped a relationship could be like from the start.
I’m not adverse to the odd romantic novel, and yet for some reason it slipped my mind that I had my own story that was just as stomach-churning-ly romantic as those stored on my Kindle.
So what’s my point in all of this…
Well that life can really suck, but also sometimes it doesn’t. I sit here worrying what my daughter might take from a Disney movie, because really who meets the love of their life and decides to marry them within a week?
Well it turns out I did.
(The only thing that slowed us down was the small matter of hubby’s divorce, which was no bad thing — we’d both had experiences that gave us the chance to work through our own shit and come out of the other side slightly less wobbly people — and he also got a really good rice cooker, which eight years on is still serving us well!)
Even now my brain is set to believe that those kind of things are too good to be true. Tempting fate and all that jazz. But it wasn’t. We fell fast, we fell hard and it stuck.
I’m not saying our relationship is perfect… we’re human. We have had our fair share of arguments and tears. But it most definitely more fun than drama. Far more good feelings than bad moments.
Our bubble didn’t burst. It evolved and became more resilient to the things that might try and pop it along the way.
A fairytale can be real and it can endure.
Now I know our experience is not everyone’s idea of bliss. I am very sure there are people passing the sick bucket, and others who think our fairytale would be their hell on earth.
But my point is that whatever your story is, or you hope it will be, it’s totally okay, and anything is possible, no matter how crazy and unrealistic it might seem.
Your experiences can be anywhere on the scale from hopeless to normal to fairytale, and it’s all absolutely valid. There is space for us all to have our own experiences, however unbelievable or uninteresting they might be to others.
Life isn’t perfect. But it can be pretty damn magical at times. And it’s okay for all it’s weird, wonderful messiness to exist.
So Happy Valentine’s Day everyone — whether you’re single or together, whether you’re happy about it or not — know that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing and however you feel, it is totally okay, and in all of it you are always so loved xxx
