Relationships Are A Lot Of Work And A Little Romance

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Once upon a time there was Disney princess movies and little girls everywhere with a hopeful heart.  In these stories, you watch an unfortunate, beautiful, young girl in a “damsel in distress” sort of situation.  And through and through her troubles, the movie picks up with triumph, where a perfect and charming knight in shining armor scoops her up on his high-horse and saves her. Wonderful, if it were real of course.  But thats just the thing, relationships aren’t always about the knight in shining armor sweeping you off your feet to your happily ever after.  

Relationships, real ones…are hard work.  It’s not always romance and love letters with a promise of forever. Sometimes you have bad dates and sometimes you have good.  Sometimes love dies and breakups make you feel like you may too.  Of course there is always the good times.  Times when your “knight” makes you feel like you’re on cloud nine.  

I know I’ve had moments in my relationship that I had to pinch myself, blink three times and clink my heels together.  But that’s love.  All of the pros and cons, the ups and downs. The laughs, the tears, the love and the fear of it.  In reality, we’re all human.  Not all the time are we going to have a fairy tale because we’re in real life, and not all the time does a knight come and save you.  I feel that sometimes society, movies and books play up love and make it all fun and gravy and I get that.  

It’s good for entertainment to have a happy ending, but I think the pressure is on us.  Not always do you fight and scream your way into love and you get what you want.  However, there’s times when you are faced with problems in your relationship and a lot of the time it doesn’t end the way you hope for it to, the way it does in the movies that is.  

So, is the fairytale “knight in shining armor” just a dead weight dream? 

When thinking realistically, I think yes.  Think about a knight in armor’s reality, a man protected in heavy metal from the medieval times that couldn’t even stand up. The weight of the the armor was so heavy it weighed the man down, leaving him unable to defend himself without help.  That is comparable to the weight and pressures of things put on a relationship.  Once things get too heavy, they tend to fall apart or become weary.  

As a society, we put too much pressure on relationships and the idea of what they should be.  We stop and forget to enjoy things when they are good.  Love is war and our armor can only protect us so much.  Just like the metal that protected those men back in the day trying to fight their way through to make it out alive.  The fight is there and the weight is sometimes too much to hold up alone.  

It is a battlefield of emotions. Relationships can take a lot out of us and make us feel like we’re fighting for something we hope to survive.  We constantly worry about what they should be or could be.  We spend time idolizing or being jealous of other relationships through pictures, not even knowing how their relationship is on the inside.  We build up these great expectations so high that we stop working on our relationships and get mad or upset when we are unsatisfied or feeling parts of it lacking.  However, it is us who destroys parts of ourselves and our partners.

Here’s how to stop killing the dream of your “happily ever after” through my eyes.  Stop indulging in the what ifs and the why nots.  In relationships, it’s normal after time to not always feel sparks or get butterflies…but don’t stop trying.  Just because you’ve been dating for X amount of years, doesn’t mean it’s not constantly something to work on.  

Think back to the days  when you first fell in love, those times where you would sit up and think all night about something special to do, places to go, things to talk about.  Those moments don’t have to go away just because you’re in a more comfortable relationship now.  Nothing comes from doing nothing and that’s what your relationship will be if you don’t put in everything you’ve got.  Your knight may not always remember special moments, bring you flowers or hold a radio over his shoulders playing “your song” at your window…but how many times can that happen until it’s almost annoying?  

Let romance in when necessary.  You don’t need to be swept off your feet everyday.  Stop letting the world around you influence your own personal relationships. Relationships that are constantly worked on won’t feel dead, and love doesn’t have to die.  The knight in shining armor may be a tough act to carry, but with two people together it’s not so bad.

“Courtly love (or fine amor) was a medieval European literary conception of love that emphasized nobility and chivalry. Medieval literature is filled with examples of knights setting out on adventures and performing various services for ladies because of their ‘courtly love.’ This kind of love is originally a literary fiction treated for the entertainment of the nobility, but as time passed, these ideas about love changed and attracted a larger audience.” (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

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