The Fantasy of Love

Imagine this one day in the distant future: if it ever becomes possible to extrapolate our consciousness from the support of the quantum physics going on in our brain in the first place and download it into some database, or artificial body, what will happen to those emotions and memories intricately tied to the mysterious regions of our being we term as love? Even if the data of the brain can be stored, can we ever capture the soul?

Augmenting our realities with technology is one thing, augmenting our mortality quite another. Digital immortality via the storage of what we term as our consciousness may make us live on in ways hitherto unimagined, but will it have to be without love? That essence we sprinkle across life. The oil in our gears. That drive to move.

In such circumstances, will we even desire immortality? If the consciousness is the sole result of the placement and interactions of the neurons in the brain, nothing more and nothing less, and love merely down to a chemical addiction between people, then possibly. But if we ever figure out that our mortality is bound too tightly to the things that make us human, would we choose it over the chance to defeat death? Although this scenario enters well within the realms of science-fiction - if not fantasy - it's a good example to highlight the importance of love in our lives.

Never take for granted those four letters that carry so much meaning. No matter who you are or where you may be in this world, there is love out there for you. Whether you believe it or not, much of our psychology is bound in togetherness and family. One day you hope to find a friendship, a fondness, an adoration so deep that you can't seem to stop thinking about that special someone.

Yet, we are always finding excuses to keep us from going in pursuit of love. Then we lose a certain hope in this little thing called love; about ever finding that special someone who will love you (and who you will love) every step of the way. Worse, sometimes we accept the love we think we deserve, not understanding that life will love you back only if you love life. Once you love yourself, you are open to love from others.

Of course there are many misconceptions that help to obscure this vision. One is that loving yourself means envisioning your being in an egotistical or narcissistic context, when it really means having enough love for who you really are to ignore such superficial constructs. Self-image is something you project from the inside out, it's not skin deep - it's not what you're born with, but how you work it. Similarly, we shouldn't think that love is a fairytale where we should all wait submissively for the fates to send our prince charming along to sweep us off our feet.

Undeniably, love is a risky venture. But you have to go out on a limb to love someone. And that someone may be completely opposite to our fantasy type and/or scenarios. And we have to be open to that. Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself, not what they look like, or how much they earn. These are things that change with time, or which you can attain together once you become a team.

Getting stuck in a fantasy mindset is dangerous. They say love is blind, well fantasy love is incurably so. You become inflexible, ignoring the real opportunities for love that come your way. This isn't about simply making do with second-best (what a horrible term to attach to any living being), or accepting something less than you feel you deserve. It's about being sufficiently aware of love to understand it can appear at the most surprising times, and open-minded enough to give it a chance. You never know where it could lead you.

Often when we ignore a chance at love is when we make the wrong choices, and end up with the greatest regrets. Not having given that person a chance, we realise too late they may have been the one. But that person is now in a committed relationship, and you've lucked out. So what do you do? You decide not to make the same mistakes with the next person to come along, only to find yourself overcompensating and giving love meant for someone else to the wrong person.

This results in what some experts term as karmic relationships - a destructive force absent of real love. Partners sense they really are making do this time, and treat their relationship as a last hope saloon, allowing their partner to hurt, cheat or abuse them time and again. It's a vacuum for emotions, but can also be cathartic when it thankfully ends: it can help us work out just what it is we don't want, and thus tweak our fantasy ideals to better fit with our reality.

And if any of this rings true for you, then don't be too hard on yourself. You just wanted to believe the fantasy you were breast-fed on.

Stuff of fairytales?

“I want to tell you a secret that will see you through all the trials that life can offer... Have courage and be kind. Where there is kindness there is goodness. And where there is goodness there is magic.”
— A mother's advice in Disney's Cinderella

Some of us will have ragged on how ubiquitous the Disney franchise and its storytelling has become: girlyfying the original harsh lessons of fairytales out of existence, nurturing generations of us with idealistic and unrealistically high expectations of what love - and life - should be. Disney's latest adaptation of the Cinderella fairytale (a live retelling of its classic animation) has come under fire from some quarters for this very reason, and why some would wish Disney would start dealing with things closer to reality. Because children are influenced by these tales, their ideals and world-views are shaped in their formative years by such fantasies. In effect, we set ourselves up for a fall if we ignore the reality of the world.

For instance, we'll have heard the usual arguments made against the franchise: the overall colonial white perspective, too many female leads who are helpless and in need of help, being neither strong, independent nor smart enough to help themselves, in saccharine storytelling of fiction played safe. No surprise that Disney turned down the chance to make Back to the Future claiming the mother/son relationship was too risqué. And from many grown women today there are (very valid) complaints how, as they were growing up, Disney films failed to provide them with strong female role models able to fight their own battles, and would wish differently for their daughters today.

Unfairness is more universal than unilateral, however. Women are stereotyped into being weak and helpless (too often), but have we considered the equal and opposite stereotyping of men? The men designed to cater to female fancy must be brave, strong, reliable, rich, forward to the point where it would be uncomfortable if they weren't found attractive - this is exactly what the male lead reflects in most Disney fairytales. But in real life if a wooing male was so forward or forceful, he would be labelled a stalker or a creep. The line between confidence and arrogance is very thin, and mere attractiveness too superficial to overlook one as the other in the long term.

Consequently, if we took these extremes of fantasy and tried to append them to our lives in the real world, real life would fall short by a large margin. If Cinderella were my daughter I would hope she wouldn't bide her time for a man to save her from servitude and her step-mother's oppression, but would make her own escape and turn that passive "my prince will come" attitude on its head. A Cinderella who is not just a pretty girl waiting to be rescued, but one who is strong, determined, and resolute enough not to simply accept the fate handed to her, and is recognised and rewarded for her efforts, her strength and persistence instead.

Keeping to the fairytale theme, this would all happen albeit magically, and maybe that's the point some detractors of Disney forget. Disney is in the fantasy business, it is based around fairytales, which are fantastical fiction. It's entertainment, escapism, a bit of fun, and most fans eventually grow up smart enough to know it's not real life.

Evidently a story of a downtrodden girl rising above the oppression of a woman affected by sexism only to become a man's trophy is not a great lesson for the kids. But like original fairytales, Disney stories do have pertinent lessons, too. The original concept of Cinderella is that of believing in your dreams as wishes of the heart - and in its 2015 adaptation Disney has upgraded this message with the theme of kindness. It's not Cinderella's beauty, but ultimately her kindness that helps to manifest her heart's desires.

Don't we need messages like that today, however unrealistic they may seem? We need some glitter, some fairy dust sprinkled over the harsher realities of life. And while Disney princesses have become much more progressive in line with our growing enlightenment, being gentle, kind and keeping faith alive even in the darkest of times is not a fault we should let anyone persuade young girls into otherwise thinking, either. There are many different types of strong. Cinderella shows one of them.

At the other end of the argument, though, teaching our children the realities of the world rarely start with be "courageous" and be "kind". It's not the way the world is currently designed. It starts with getting out there, learning to stand on your own two feet, and working hard. But that is also why we need to believe in a bit of magic - that belief should be our inexhaustible hope and faith that there is goodness and love in the world.

Now that is something to fire a child's imagination with and inspire his or her mind to fully wake to their true potential. And let me qualify that by emphasising having an imagination and living in a fantasy are two entirely different things. Using our imagination is vital to not only the functioning of the brain, but to the functioning of those elusive processes that give us a sense of a soul. It's not about escapism away from life, it's about creatively problem-solving the tribulations of life.

Despite seeing Cinderella's gentile attributes as commendable (as much as they are), being a more creative problem solver would have helped her out immensely in my opinion. If nothing else, it makes the hopeless seem more hopeful, as a person or situation.

Stuff the fairytales?

“You're stuck on the rosy notion that the world operates on goodness... decency. Truth is all that guarantees you is an early grave. The biggest joke of all? What sinks you every time is hope. Hope that the world will right itself. That the just will be rewarded and the wicked punished. I don't want you to buy into that horse shit or you're dead in the water. The only way to survive in this disgusting, godforsaken world is to take control.”
— A mother's advice in "American Horror Story: Freak Show" (Episode 7, "Test of Strength")

Kept to a healthy minimum, we all need to keep that childhood exuberance for magic alive. It is a font in which we can refresh our enthusiasm for life, because the pendulum can all too often swing the other way: cold, reasoning pragmatism can quickly turn us all into hardened cynics.

A prime example can be found in one of the oldest published weekly British political magazines, The Spectator. It ran an interesting 2014 August article by Julie Burchill, deriding what she describes as a spiritual cult of women desperately seeking their "One" true love. She bemoans this "sad-sack" of spirituality, the romantic blasphemy of belief in a human spiritual union, as fairytale filler in the gaping souls of the godless.

Now according to Burchill we should not look for "the meaning of life in the dear, fallible creature lying next to you; instead, look upwards", revealing her editorial ideologies. Similar to the political magazine she writes for, Burchill's political line is a conservative ideology that promotes retaining those social institutions they deem as traditional. It's a philosophy with a very narrow pendulum - it either swings to preserve things as they are, touting stability and continuity, or swings towards its "reactionaries" who oppose modernism and seek a return to "the way things were".

Keeping it real in her article, Burchill is quick to qualify that she is not arguing for the "entirely fictional Good Old Days". However, whilst describing herself as a lover of the modern world, the tone of her article contradicts this, opening with a scathing sentiment on modern female celebrities. Moreover, she admits she is a Christian believer, but doesn't believe in looking for the one, but the one for the moment - which seems converse coming from a woman who has been married for nearly 20 years to a husband she professes to adore.

Each to their own opinions, and some of Burchill's own may make sense to us at first glance. But arguably the underlying confusion of Burchill's article, which continues throughout, is hard to escape. It also extends to her analogies about those who believe there IS a special person out there for everyone. In the same way when Burchill tells us to "look upwards" for divine love, she doesn't literally mean upwards - it's a metaphor - she forgets that the belief there is a spiritual "One" out there for us is a metaphor, too.

Denigrating the denizens since time immemorial has its own pitfalls. Not merely confusing dictionary definitions, urban colloquialisms and metaphors, all the examples Burchill uses in her piece about those who believe in, what she describes as, "serial monogamy" are caricatures, and not what spiritual believers in divine love adhere to. True love isn't about spending your entire life searching zealously for something to fill up the spaces inside, as though antiquing for the perfect ornament to fill an empty interior and it's certainly not about "deconsecrating and deconstructing marriage" or turning it into "a psychotic seesaw".

Because who said romantic love was the be-all, end-all and know-all of female aspiration? I've certainly never made such a foolish claim on my blog. I emphasise time and again that we are physical beings, and romantic relationships need to be worked at in the real world. In a previous post about building stronger bridges to love I warn about not being a stranger to love, else love will be a stranger to our lives - as it currently seems to be in the larger world, because too many are looking upwards for love, rather than inwards. And sadly it seems that love is a stranger to Burchill, too. She has a joyous marriage, and yet can't see why.

You only really appreciate something once it is lost, so the saying goes, but it doesn't have to be this way. Besides if someone only appreciates you when you stop valuing them, that is conversely a prime indicator of a karmic relationship. Love does not need a reason to provide value or show appreciation, it will do so because it wills it, not because we will get something out of it. In a healthy relationship, love is a game that two can play and both win, because it's a team effort - one is not pitted against the other for domination.

And it's obvious Burchill is a good product of her times, too, having (possibly accidentally) discovered that one of the secrets to a long marriage is not keeping your head stuck in the clouds of a fantasy fairytale version of love, but keeping it honest and real. The equation that happiness equals reality minus expectation is true. In her decades long marriage, it's clear Burchill values her husband for who he is, and not what he does - or how he measures up to the prince charming in her head.

Nevertheless, although this is a given, we forget that there is this middle ground, a balanced field where love is best nourished because love itself is a balancer of life. We all know the saying love is not finding someone you can live with, but someone you can't live without. In actuality it needs to be a balance of both.

If love is a stranger

Great love brings balance - its imbalance is what increases stress in life. Some experts say love starts in the brain and that, from looking at the brain scans of the broken-hearted, recovering from a break-up is like a kicking an addiction to a drug. Emotional instability, constant ups and downs are not healthy for the brain, or a stable relationship. But when you decrease stress, your hormones are in a better place to do just about anything for your body and mind. For where there is real balancing love, there is life - even blackened as it is by our tirades, our trust-killing abuses and racist rants, making the fantasy look at lot more preferable, but just that further away as well.

Geared towards this aim, balance in all things is essential. For example, while abuse, bullying and delusions of nationalism drive people apart, entertainment can bring us together. It can inspire, and recapture hardened hearts. We know how widely TV has influenced our world (often negatively as Burchill reminds us) but it's also a medium with the opportunities to use that influence for the greater good. Done right Disney's entertainment is an opportunity to bring together families on all human values based on love. Schmaltzy? Yes. Idealistic? Yes. Unrealistic in its portrayals? Yes. But when it gets the balance right, it can move us where we as the audience can aspire to, and put our hope in, the goodness that exists in the real world.

Even when that world looks so bleak: a world where anti-terror drives are driving us closer to terror, while well-intentioned protesters turn to violence and set the fight for social justice back generations. When injustice against people of colour rears its ugly head in our modern lives, it is no longer met with the dignity such as was shown in the protests against segregated America decades before. The resonating power of peaceful protest is taught in schools today, but minds in stupor don't learn effectively. So susceptible are we to depression, obsession, compulsion and paranoia in increasing numbers, it feels as though as a species we're suffering an economic post-crash ordeal.

Recent recognition that the true measure of progress is well-being rather than economics, is enormously encouraging, however. Achieving well-being that is sustainable requires us to consider to think creatively about how to optimise good lives in a way that is fair and sustainable - and early education lies at the heart of this. But we need to awaken minds first, as early on as we can. Campaigns for better relationship education say that many children lack basic knowledge about their bodies, and they need to be better educated from a younger age about saying "no" to coerced sex, for example.

Bullying is another increasingly worrisome trend. It seems we're all looking for a target to bully so that we won't be the target. When you go through your formative years, it's easy to become mentally scarred by bullies, who usually have their own issues - mainly low self esteem - which they try to inflict on others like a plague. It can make us feel like 99 percent of people on this planet are horrible, and not really worth meeting. But such bitterness can destroy us more than the bullying. And in the process of wanting revenge on bullies, we can end up being just as mean as they are.

Only to be more successful than any of the people who bullied you takes more than career and wealth success in adult life. More importantly you need to be happier than they are. You do this by showing yourself compassion, by being your own best friend, and looking out for yourself. It's good psychology and proper philosophy to love yourself and believe in yourself as much as you can. Own your life, don't disown it. Don't bury your truth: truth buried will take root and grow, furrowing out of you when you least expect it. Release it instead: we must get rid of the life we left to make way for the life ahead of us.

Your human spirit is a lot more resilient than you might think. Love makes it so. Do what you love everyday, have peace in your heart that even though people treated you cruelly, you overcame it and allowed yourself to love and BE loved by others. It doesn't matter how long the process is towards that inner balance. We will learn from our mistakes, and learn how strong we truly are. We will learn from the experience to accept others for who they are, too, and accept the same. We will learn that the future is never behind us, because we are the sum of our choices, the strength of our commitments, the ties that binds us together. And that we all deserve a love to make our heart forget it was ever broken.

Commit to living life with love, therefore, and then commit to loving well. Do this in the knowledge that love is not sustainable only with that "can't eat, can't sleep, reach for the stars, over the fence" kinda stuff, it's also needs the stable, dependable, everyday small stuff. So find someone that can make you smile, and never give up on them. Understand that nobody is perfect until you fall in love with them. Accept that people come into our lives and leave footprints - just make sure it's only those loving imprints that mean we are never the same again.

Ultimately, keep faith and hope in people, and if we need a little fantasy to keep the magic alive, then there's nothing wrong with that. Don't lose your innocence, hope or faith. Don't lose the need for fairytales, just let go your reliance on living through them. Trust in the strength of your own story - which, when well told, will not feel the need to shock you into paying it attention.

Never forget when you do, that once in a while, in the middle of ordinary life, love will give you a fairytale of your very own.

To happily ever after in love,