For love to be “true,” then, its motive must be singular—reciprocal affection—but it also must not come easily. There is a sense in these stories that boundaries (whether they be physical or social) must be transcended in order to establish the value of that love. Sacrifices must be made. Transformations must occur. And though love in ordinary life does require sacrifice and can be transformative, those sacrifices tend to be subtle and ongoing and those transformations stretched out over years, not days.
Most of these stories rely on an inherent paradox: True love is the ultimate means of validation and personal transformation, and yet a virtuous woman should never pursue love directly. (Men in persecuted hero roles, on the other hand, are allowed—even expected—to woo their love interests.) Love is the means by which Cinderella and Vivian and Sixteen Candles’s Samantha get what they want: status, wealth, recognition. But these characters are rewarded for not seeking love, for cultivating silent crushes and earnest longing. When Vivian rejects Edward’s offer of ongoing financial support and tells him she wants “the fairy tale,” she comes closer than most persecuted heroines ever do to expressing her desires directly—though even as she’s breaking this trope, she’s explicitly longing for it. Most heroines run away from love (often literally, at the stroke of midnight), solemnly resigning themselves to life alone. Then some external force—a hotel manager, a Chinese exchange student, a troupe of fat mice—assists the prince in finding his soul mate. For decades feminists have criticized fairy tales for making princesses too passive, but even our contemporary stories are creepingly slow at giving female protagonists agency.
The love in our most iconic narratives strikes me as not particularly true at all. But it’s easy to see why fetishizing love in this way makes it so powerful. How nice it would be to rely on the machinations of a world that understands your worth and anticipates your needs. The idea that love can offer this is very seductive.
• • •
I spent much of my first serious relationship watching Kevin do things. I took up his hobbies out of a fear that he would come to love rock climbing or skiing or photography more than he loved me. I genuinely liked these things, but it took a couple of years for me to determine whether I did them because I wanted to or because I wanted to be the kind of person he wanted.
How do you love someone without trying to please him, I wondered. And if I didn’t want to be good anymore, what did I want to be?
When I found myself single at age thirty, I decided—perhaps unconsciously at first—to undo some of the effects of years spent seeking validation in love.
I needed to understand my own worth and anticipate my own needs. I was surprised to find this took practice. Did I actually like eggs with runny yolks? Did I like listening to bluegrass? Could I become the kind of woman who wore heels?
When I went on dates, I had to coach myself: My goal was not to make this stranger from the internet like me; my goal was to find out if I liked him. It was a small but radical shift in perspective. When he asked me a question, I didn’t have to give the answer I thought he would like—I could just answer honestly. I was already interesting, I didn’t need someone else to confirm this for me. I literally looked in the mirror and said these words to myself: You are already interesting. Your life is already good. It’s okay to say exactly what you want, when you want it. And it’s okay to not know.
I’m still working on this—asking for what I want, believing it matters; maybe abandoning my desire to please is a lifelong practice.
• • •
Love, and then marriage, was a means of social ascension for both my mother and my grandmother—or that’s what I used to believe. When I looked at their stories, it seemed obvious that a turning point in both their lives was the moment they were chosen by men who could give them access to things they didn’t have before. But when I examine their lives more closely, this idea doesn’t quite hold up. For my grandmother, who wed at fifteen, marriage meant going from cleaning other people’s homes to cleaning her own. It was a small bump in status, but she continued to live a hard life defined primarily by poverty and caretaking until her eight children grew up and left home. My mom, who married at twenty, fell in love with my dad as she was graduating high school and going away to college. Her education enabled her independence more than her husband did. She was pursuing experiences beyond her tiny Appalachian town even before she was engaged.
I don’t know how to reconcile the part of myself that is charmed by the impossible optimism of Pretty Woman with the part that is wary of the implications of the romantic meritocracy.
• • •
“Whether [Cinderella is] more a fantasy of romantic love or a fantasy of economic security, power and rescue from a lifetime of washing floors may depend on who’s telling it and who’s hearing it and when,” writes Linda Holmes. When my grandmother tells her love story, it is a Cinderella story. She is a romantic and she wants me to know that she was chosen. But I can’t help but see it as an economic fantasy: She had very little, and now, at age eighty-five, she has everything she could want. Likewise, in Pretty Woman love—or, more accurately, being loved—is a means of social ascension for Vivian. She is a good girl in disguise, chosen by a man who can make her life the one she deserves.
A quick glance around shows that the loved are not always virtuous and the virtuous are not always loved. But our love stories make this difficult to remember. As Susan Ostrov Weisser puts it in her book The Glass Slipper: Women and Love Stories, “While our egalitarian idea of romantic love implies that everyone deserves and can get love, love stories present a different picture: The ones who are lovable and are loved (not necessarily the same) are also represented as a privileged class, to be imitated or at least envied.”12
In the world of Cinderella stories, that privileged class is also almost exclusively white. In Pretty Woman and Dirty Dancing and Notting Hill (and pretty much every romantic comedy I devoted hours of my adolescence to), every character with a speaking role is white—or passes for white, in the case of Hector Elizondo’s hotel manager character, Barney Thompson. Even in Maid in Manhattan, where Jennifer Lopez’s persecuted heroine is a Puerto Rican hotel maid, her white prince (Ralph Fiennes as an aspiring Republican senator—yes, you read that right) describes her as “kind of Mediterranean looking.”
Equating Cinderella’s social ascension with her ability to find the love of a powerful white man has disturbing implications about deservingness and the kind of rewards that matter. In Maid in Manhattan the prize is not just wealth but the ability to leave the (nonwhite) servant class and fit in in an otherwise-white upper-class community. The only truly diverse version of Cinderella is the 1997 TV remake of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical starring Whitney Houston as the fairy godmother, pop star Brandy Norwood as Cinderella, and Filipino American Paolo Montalbán as the prince. Compared to the 2015 Cinderella, it feels radical.
If we think of stories like Cinderella and Pretty Woman as fantasies of economic redemption, it seems useful to consider all the people who make these happy endings possible—that is, all the people who are not redeemed but who enable redemption. In Maid in Manhattan, Marisa is assisted by a troupe of plucky maids, women of color who have no immediate prospects for social ascension but are happy to support her just for the opportunity to see “one of us out there.” Cinderella stories allow us to ignore the fates of these minor characters. To think about it another way: If Cinderella no longer has to wash the floors, we might ask who is washing them instead.
We often talk about the “boy-crazy years” as if an infatuation with romance is an inevitable phase of girlhood. In an essay called “Love Poems Are Dead,” the poet Morgan Parker writes about her lack of interest in romantic comedies as a teenager: “Maybe this love, this Shakespearean, Kate Hudson love, was not for me. Was not for black girls. Maybe love was another Nancy Meyers ideal, another privilege. Something for people who didn’t have other things to worry about.”13 She’s right: Being
able to worry about whether you will ever experience the kind of love that will change your life is a privilege in and of itself.
The thing I never stopped to consider during my single teenage years was how lucky I was to spend the first years of my life assured of my own worthiness. We’d watch Miss America and Mom would say that we—Casey and I, with our long, scrawny limbs and white-blond hair—would grow up to be as pretty as any of the girls on the stage. My dad would tell me that he always had crushes on the girls with blue eyes, girls who looked just like me. I had enough in common with the protagonists of every movie I loved—I was white, thin, straight, conventionally feminine—that it was easy to empathize with these characters. It did not occur to me that other people—many other people—did not automatically see themselves in these stories.
• • •
When I moved to Florida to start grad school at twenty-two, I told my new friends that I had a boyfriend living in Bolivia. This wasn’t true. But I believed that word, boyfriend, was the best way to show them that I was worth befriending—because I had already been chosen. And a serious long-distance boyfriend was one step below a fiancé—which was the pinnacle of romantic validation, especially in the South.
The truth was that I was in love with someone who lived in Bolivia and we exchanged long letters about how much we missed each other. But he was not my boyfriend. In fact, years later I would discover that he was seeing someone else all along. Sometimes I think about my small lie and wonder about what might’ve happened if I hadn’t told it. I feel certain that I would’ve had more fun. I would’ve made more friends. Most likely, my desire to prove my own interestingness is what actually kept me from doing interesting things.
If, at twenty-two, I’d been in love with someone who wanted to get married, I might’ve done it. Plenty of people around me did. And maybe then I could’ve looked at my ring finger and felt more assured about my place in the world. But my life would not have been better for it.
“We are still wired to see marriages as the (happy) endings to women’s stories,” writes Rebecca Traister in her 2016 book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.14 Traister points out that our assumptions about single women are often guided by “an unconscious conviction that, if a woman is not wed, it’s not because she’s made a set of active choices, but rather that she has not been selected—chosen, desired, valued enough.” But these assumptions are misguided. She points out that while there are some drawbacks to a single life, there are just as many ways to be lonely, unhappy, disappointed, or bored within a marriage. For many women, a life of independence and autonomy is at least as rewarding as marriage.
Though we tend to conceptualize marriage as the ultimate expression of romantic love, more and more research shows that the institution primarily benefits those who are well educated and financially secure. The Council on Contemporary Families reports that college-educated women are the group most likely to stay married and to describe their marriages as happy.15 And thanks to an increase in what economists term “assortative mating,” we are increasingly likely to marry people from educational and socioeconomic backgrounds similar to our own. It seems that, like love itself, a satisfying marriage is another privilege that has more to do with your circumstances than with your virtue. The Cinderella fantasy might actually be more unlikely than ever.
It is difficult to locate your own sense of value in a world that is still preoccupied by Cinderella stories, where entire shelves of airport newsstands are full of bridal magazines, and even Sex and the City ends with a wedding. I’m glad that, in my early thirties, I got the chance to figure out who and how I wanted to be outside of a relationship. Sometimes I wish I had done this earlier, or that I’d wasted less energy feeling anxious about true love and whether it would come my way. I wish I’d been taught to indulge the pleasures of being alone.
It’s not that I am free from anxiety about love now, but rather that I can see all the ways I’ve benefited from the time and space to make my life my own.
When it comes to love, we tend to arrange our narratives to suit our sense of the world as a place that recognizes deservingness. But here’s what I’ve come to believe instead: Most of us deserve love, and, statistically speaking, most of us will find it. And it will make most of us happy—for at least a little while.
• • •
When I try to imagine a truly subversive Cinderella story, I fail. And I think that’s because the animating idea of every Cinderella story is fundamentally flawed—the concept that love is the emotional and social and economic reward for goodness. I just don’t buy it.
The fact is, I want my stories to represent something that’s a little bit closer to the world that I live in. And when I think of the interesting, smart, kind girls I know, I want the world to offer them something more than the opportunity to be chosen.
That said, if it were up to me, Pretty Woman would end like this:
Realizing her penthouse fantasy has run its course, Vivian packs her things to leave.
Edward, suddenly stricken by the prospect of his own loneliness, asks her to stay. He wants to spend more time together, he says—he could even put her up in a nice condo.
“You know,” Vivian says, “I thought I wanted the fairy tale, but I’m just not sure anymore.”
She wants to get out of town and go back to school. It might be nice, she thinks, to take some time before getting into a serious relationship—a few years at least. And then maybe find someone her own age, maybe a man or maybe a woman, but mainly she wants someone who is emotionally available.
She tells Edward how grateful she is for the time they’ve spent together—it really was fun. And the clothes! He’s been so generous. She says she hopes he can do more of the picnic/bubble-bath/walking-barefoot-in-the-grass kind of thing. Then she pulls him close and kisses his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what I was thinking with the condo. . . .” He smiles as he helps her with her bags. “This week has meant a lot to me.”
We watch as Vivian climbs into a cab and then boards a bus to San Francisco.
A man crosses Hollywood Boulevard as Vivian’s bus cruises by. “Welcome to Hollywood,” he shouts to no one in particular. “Everybody’s got a dream. What’s your dream?”
A caption at the bottom of the screen tells us that in ten years Vivian will have a master’s in social work and a career advocating for sex workers in California. Just before the credits roll, Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” starts up; we see Vivian put on her headphones, smiling as she heads north, alone.
the black box
thoughts on the stories we don’t tell
We were at Mamaw’s house one night when my aunt Cindy began telling the story of the one disastrous date she went on with my father.
“I told your dad I wasn’t about to buy his dinner.” She laughed. “Not even if I had the money for it, which I did not.” Everyone in the room was listening, and though each of us had heard the story before, no one was sure what would happen next in this version. When Cindy tells a story, we listen and laugh and assume it’s only half true anyway. “And then he just got up and drove off!” she said. “Left me at the Patio with the food. And you know everyone in Pennington saw me standing there, arms full of French fries, because everyone went to the Patio back then. I’ve never been so embarrassed in all my life. And that, girls”—she looked at Casey and then at me—“is why I’m not your mother.”
It lingers in my mind as a near-perfect moment: standing in Mamaw’s kitchen for Casey’s graduation party, CONGRADULATIONS balloons bobbing above the counter, a half-eaten Food City sheet cake sitting at the center of the table, all of us laughing as if we were hearing the story for the first time. Mom rolling her eyes, not knowing or remembering if that’s how it happened. My dad’s face bright, his squinting eyes, like mine, disappearing in laughter.
In a couple of hours, we would drive back to my parents’ house, and M
om and Dad would sit us down and tell us they didn’t love each other anymore.
Divorce is all hamartia, all human error and fallibility. But my parents’ divorce seemed like a non sequitur, like turning to page seventy-six of the Choose Your Own Adventure book and discovering you’d been eaten by an alligator.
Years have passed since that night, but I’m still hung up on the underlying question: How does one thing become another?
• • •
Physicists and engineers and computer scientists often use the concept of a black box to represent what they don’t know. The box indicates an opaque component within a system. They know what goes in and what comes out, but they can only hypothesize about what happens inside it. The point of the black box isn’t necessarily to figure out what’s inside, but rather to find a way to work around the unknown. Once you start thinking about it, you realize our lives are full of black boxes: closed-door meetings, the Google search algorithm, the mechanics of desire.
I think of my parents’ marriage—or the last few years of it—as a black box. It seemed we were all happy enough when I moved away from home. But something changed. I tried but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I couldn’t see inside the box. I was sure there had to be some agent of transformation, some dormant impulse activated, some rule violated.
For their part, my parents offered no explanation other than to say that they didn’t love each other the way they once did. They assured us that they had tried but could see no resolution. There were no infidelities, no obvious betrayals, no secret addictions. The separation seemed so painful for each of them to discuss that I quickly gave up asking.
When I was a teenager, I told a friend that, apart from one of my parents dying, their divorce was the worst thing I could possibly imagine. Sixteen years living in the same small town and the same happy family meant their divorce was only a thought experiment, a possibility that existed in an alternative universe. It could happen to a person who was like me, but not to me. People still used the phrase broken family then, and I just assumed we didn’t have it in us to break. If I tried picturing one parent without the other, I came up blank. I felt as safe from divorce as I did from alien abduction or a zombie apocalypse. And they let me feel that way, probably because they felt pretty safe, too.
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