
And isn't that all that the promise of love turns out to be? A big, fat, giant bluff... like being Punk'd by society at large, by the myriad of movies that promise the fairy tale, and most often by the significant other who convinced us to believe the lie of love only to dismantle it in the end. It just seems so insane that otherwise capable, intelligent, interesting people make the mistake over and over to believe in the notion that love conquers all in the face of mounting evidence that it, in fact, does not.
You can call me jaded, bitter, and lonely. But I like to believe that bitterness is the result of reality. People are not born bitter, just as troubled teens don't just fall out of the sky. Life experiences that teach you that it is definitely a bad idea to trust anyone close to you largely contribute to the life outlook of jaded thirty-something women AND adolescent rage. It is hard to not begin to settle on the conclusion that love is a lie. Indeed, most of us spend our entire lives so focused on chasing the lie that we have been sold (by movies, by Hallmark, by the online dating industry) that we begin to ignore our own interests, stop developing ourselves, and become one-note harpies about either our desire for a "true love" relationship or how we can't believe that the relationship that is ending didn't end up being "the one."
Indeed, the true love/soul mate market needs a strong dose of my jaded/bitter/lonely thirty-something reality. There is no true love. There is no "the one." There might be many "ones" that all fulfill your love needs for a few years. There might be one "one" that you grow bored with, or worse, grow to resent. But unless your definition of love is flexible and unless you know that the grass is not greener in another relationship and unless you stop defining yourself or your happiness by your relationship status and unless you have the strength to shirk the messages that we have been receiving since we were three about what fairy-tale "true love" is supposed to look like, it is inevitable that you will be unhappy in whatever stage of love you happen to be in.
The brilliant part about The Princess Bride is that the book, unlike the movie, ends with author William Goldman hinting at how the happy ending - Fezzik, Buttercup, Westley, and Inigo all riding four white horses into the sunset - is only temporary. He briefly mentions a few of the things that begin to go wrong after the departure from Humperdink's castle. And I guess that is what I am beginning to look for in affairs of the heart... the things that go wrong, the lies, and the realization that, in the words of Westley, "life is pain." And I'll take that over the false promise of true love any day.