We need to break up with the fairy tale that love movies have taught us if we want to have a strong and healthy relationship that is built on God.
All my life I’ve grown watching romantic movies, reading fairy tales and listening to love songs. So it was to be expected that my perception about love would be pretty much mistaken.
I mean, you don’t really meet a person and marry them a couple of days later - hello Cinderella? They didn’t even talk during their first dance for crying out loud! And they lived happily ever after? That just doesn’t make sense.
Ok I am done with complaining about disney movies. My point is, we have been taught so wrongly about love and relationships.
That’s why it’s so important that we can unlearn the unhealthy ways we've grown up watching and instead learn to go to God and his word to have the right perspective. We need to stop living in a fairy tale world where nothing ever goes wrong.
I am sorry to break it to you but relationships are hard. You think being single is hard? Being in a relationship can be hard as well! You just decide to work on them because they are worth it.
It’s not all pink and flowers, butterflies and rainbows. There are differences, arguments, mistakes and even hurt. But if you decide not to just bring God into your single life and ask his guidance to choose someone, but also bring him into your relationship, I promise it’s going to make it a lot better.
Why? Because you need to receive God’s love first to be able to love your partner the way they deserve to be loved. You need God to be able to forgive when the other person messes up and to learn to be humble enough when you need to ask for forgiveness when you mess up.
Ultimately, you need God to guide in your relationship overall. And decide that just because your relationship doesn’t look like the ones from fairy tales doesn’t mean that is not a good one. And just because your partner doesn’t go with the script you have in your head doesn’t mean that they are a bad person or that they don't love you.
What’s the problem with fairytales?
Fairy tales are stories that we make up in our heads and wish they were true. They are a fantasy, a dream, an impossibly perfect ending that is heavy on imagination and light on reality.
Pastor Rich says in his book Single & Secure “The problem, though, is that if you don’t have a realistic idea of what dating, love, marriage, and family look like, you might fall in love with a fairy tale rather than a person. You need a clear vision of what is actually possible, not what you wish were possible.”
He talks about 3 fairy tale premises that we need to break up with:
- All you have to do is find “the one” to get your happily ever after
Marriage is not the finish line, it is just the beginning. You can only live happily ever after if you are willing to put in the work every day after you get married. And that comes with learning and growing, loving and forgiving, enjoying the good times but also sticking out for the tough ones. - Someone has to be rescued
You don’t have to be rescued or find someone who needs to be rescued. Marriage is about two people walking together looking in the same direction, not one person constantly saving the other one. - The best (or only) kind of love is love at first sight
This is wrong not because love can’t happen instantaneously, but because it has to go deeper than what you see and last longer than a flash of passion.
The point of all of this is that we need to stop living in a fantasy world and stop attaching our happiness to things that are not real. We need to break up with the fairy tale before it breaks us down. And learn to go to God through the process of it all.
Trust me, when you break up with the wrong ideas you have in your head about love and love your partner for who they are, your relationship turns out to be even better than fairy tales.
If you want to learn more about being single and having good relationships we encourage you to watch Pastor Rich Wilkerson’s Sermon Series: Single and Secure.
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