Every girl loves a good love story.
We all grew up fantasizing about being the princess in the fairy tale. We dreamed about our prince charming and our happy ending.
We loved watching beautiful people live beautiful and perfect lives where they always said the right thing.
Watching the budding romance and the infatuation and passion that they felt for each other taught us to look for the same in our own lives.
It became our ideal, our vision of what love looks like. But, the problem with fairytales is that they get love all wrong.
They never get to the real love story. They show the falling in love part, but that’s the easy part. They don’t show the STAYING in love part, the “choosing each other over and over again” part.
And that’s where the real magic is. There’s no magic in staying with someone when things are easy. Anyone can do that.
The REAL love story begins when life gets tough.
It’s about going through hell and back with someone, sometimes more than once. It’s about learning to love that person on days where you don’t even want to particularly like them.
You have to realize that a happy relationship doesn’t mean things are always perfect. Love means seeing each other at your absolute worsts and saying “I’m not going anywhere”.
It’s about learning that love isn’t something that just happens to you- it’s work.
You have to choose your spouse over and over. Show them your love in the little gestures. Forgive each other, grow together, and make sacrifices.
So don’t let the storybooks give you the wrong idea. Real life and real love are so much messier, and it most certainly isn’t a fairytale.
No, it is so much better than that.
It’s magical because real beauty is so much more than skin deep. Real love is brave because it is constantly vulnerable, yet trusting of the other person enough to know it’ll be okay.
It’s perfect because it’s nowhere near perfect.
It is real. It is raw. It is everything.