The Cynic's Guide to 'True Love'

It usually starts with a Disney movie. You are the doe-eyed child staring longingly at the cartoon screen as the prince and princess finally kiss before they go on to live happily ever after. Too young to have any comprehension of what maintaining a relationship with another human being actually involves.

Your parents are no help. They’re one of those couples.

You know, the type — Been together since the flood, knew from the first moment they looked at each other they’d found ‘the one’, occasional bickering is as close to a ‘fight’ as they get, still walk hand in hand down the street and always kiss each other goodbye and say “I love you” before they go to bed at night.

As a kid, you watch the fairytales play out on screen or read about them in your books. You watch your parents together at home and decide with the absence of talking animal sidekicks, evil witches and enchanted forests; they’re about as close to the ‘fairytale’ as real life gets. You hang on every word when they tell you the story of how they met for the hundredth time, imagining the day your true love will “step on your foot, turn around to stop you from tripping over and then when your eyes meet, will fall madly in love at first sight”.

My mum was seventeen when she met my dad. He was a little older, but she always said that boys needed a little longer to mature and get things out of their system than girls. So it was a good age gap because he was ready to put his party boy days behind him and settle down. All she ever wanted was to meet the love of her life and have babies, so to meet the man of her dreams at seventeen was a dream come true. My dad was her first everything.

Both had visions of the future that they quickly set aside to be together. He wanted to join the airforce, and she wanted to join the navy. As fate would have it, neither would do those things. Instead, they would date, get married, have two daughters and spend the rest of their days in the same little town they both grew up in.

Even as I’m retelling their story, it sounds enviable to me. The simplicity of finding that kind of contentment simply from being with the right person is completely alluring, not to mention feeds into every fairytale I’ve ever been told.

The only problem with it is, it is the absolute exception. Not the rule.

When I entered my teens, my outlook was severely rose-tinted. I genuinely thought the first boy I dated would be the boy I grew old with.

Imagine my complete shock when I ended up having to kiss more than a few frogs. My pure, optimistic little heart was broken and trampled on with every boy who “should’ve been the one”. With every boy who said all the right things only to lie, cheat or just stop liking me, my unreserved trust and unwavering belief in true love started to deteriorate.

I was on my way to becoming a ‘true love’ cynic, and I just didn’t know it yet.

It really came to a head when I finished high school and entered into what you could consider to be my first “real relationship”. I committed two of what should have been the best years of my young life to the wrong boy. It was toxic and codependent. Not to mention I kept trying to uphold this ridiculous standard based on my view of “the perfect relationship”. It wasn’t the intent, but the way my mum had always talked about her relationship with my dad made me believe that I should have been the planet and my boyfriend the moon that orbited around me. I thought this was ‘romantic’. All it meant was that I became controlling and desperate. I was in pursuit of a thing rather than a person.

I wanted ‘the’ relationship so badly I didn’t even realise that the entire thing was completely unhealthy and that at the bones of it, I didn’t even like this person, let alone love them.

It undoubtedly comes as no surprise that this relationship crashed and burned. It was one of those bitter breakups. The kind where you can’t even muster up a polite “Hello” if you pass them at the supermarket. It wasn’t even his fault. But I look back on that relationship with so much resentment and such a longing for a do-over, where I was single and carefree and doing all the things an eighteen-year-old should be doing.

When you have a relationship like my parents as your example, you never even learn the meaning of the word ‘baggage’. So you definitely are not prepared for it to be something you’ll be carrying a load of when you finally do meet the right person.

Not even six months after the end of my first relationship, I met the man who would later become my husband. That didn’t stop me from going into the relationship with all the same expectations of ‘true love’ and making many of the same mistakes I’d made the first time, unfortunately.

After trying so hard to control and bend and mould it into what I thought it needed to be, I finally realised that maybe the problem wasn’t the relationship. The problem was my expectations.

Now, I am not suggesting that we should lower our expectations of men when it comes to how we feel we should be treated in a relationship. I’m suggesting we lower our expectations of ourselves and the other imperfect human we choose to work hard to build a life with.

Now that I’m thirty and married with a family of my own, I’m able to reflect on what I always perceived as ‘perfect’ with less of a rose tint. It wasn’t as perfect as I thought. There were cracks; there were strains; there were questions. My parents just did an excellent job of not letting my sister or I see any of that. I wish they had, though, because then I would’ve had a more realistic expectation of love.

These days, I am a ‘true love’ cynic. I don’t believe in it. I believe in sparks, initial attraction, excitement and lust. All the things in the early days that draw us to a person and feels largely out of our control. But when it comes to love, I believe that to be a choice. After ten years with the same person, I believe in hard work and commitment. I believe in compatibility and compromise. I believe in two separate people who choose to support each other and walk side by side in life.

My mum holds extremely traditional views on marriage. “Til death do us part” is taken extremely literally. Marriage is an unbreakable commitment. Which, in a happy union, I’m all for.

Full disclosure: If I were faced with the same choice now, I would not get married. Not because I don’t love my husband, but because I don’t believe that you can rationally predict or commit to how you are going to think or feel about someone for the rest of your life.

I remember when my perspective started to shift, I realised I didn’t want to be the centre of anyone’s orbit or have them be the centre of mine. I thought it was unhealthy to use phrases like “I need you” to another person. I started to think rationally about circumstances that could rip you apart that aren’t within your control, like your partner dying. And how you needed to be strong enough as an individual to continue on and be happy in the absence of a partner.

I believe in amicable separation. I love my husband enough to want him to be happy on his own if we can no longer find that with each other. I’d rather part ways on good terms with a clear outlook on why we are better off apart than fight tooth and nail to hold something together that doesn’t serve either of us anymore.

But here’s the thing, I believe that this perspective shift is why we’ve been together for ten years. Why we don’t argue often. Why I don’t carry any fear of losing him. Why I don’t obsess over our relationship and all the ways it isn’t perfect.

The key to ‘true love’, in my opinion, isn’t about intensity or obsession. It’s about respect, support and a clear understanding of each other. And carrying that through to whatever your relationship evolves into.

I no longer dream about the fairytale, instead I carry myself as a strong, independent individual who is lucky enough to have found someone to share life, love and experiences with for as long as it serves us both well.

And for that, I believe I am far more content.