Being Rescued By One True Love Is Not A Bad Thing

I read an interview the other day, in which some highly successful woman talked about how she didn't let daughter hear fairy tales because it was terrible for a little girl to grow up thinking all she could do was wait for a man to come rescue her.

The message, as I take it, is: Don't just sit around waiting for someone else to change your life. Be independent. Have dreams. Achieve them yourself. Live your best life. And if love comes along, sure, fine, embrace that too. But don't wait for it to rescue you.

That's not unwise advice, at some level. One should not actively refuse to live and to better oneself out of hopes that somehow love will come descending like a cherub and transform your life.

And yet, to voice that objection to fairy tales strikes me as misunderstanding fairy tales. Cinderella is not passing up job offers or scholarships to clean house, waiting mousily for love to come and rescue her. She is, like many of the young people in fairy tales, dealt a very poor hand: her mother dead, her father remarried to a cruel woman, then her father dead. Trapped in a dead end job, she does the best that she can by being as virtuous as she can, by returning good for evil.

That a fairy godmother sends her to the ball where she attracts the attention of the prince is in some sense simply an externalization of a basically moral point: even in a bad situation, it is more rewarding to be good than succumb to evil.

None of us will be given the chance to marry royalty, perhaps, and swept away a life of wealth and ease. Yet if we do find someone to love, and who loves us, it can be one of the brighter points in life.

Indeed, it's even worth giving up a fair amount of that dream chasing in order to be with the person you love and provide for the chance for your love to be fruitful.

One of the first things I did when we decided to get married was drop all the ideas I'd talked about concerning a creating career and get a job that paid bills. I don't regret that a bit. The dreams I'd toyed with, of trying to be a professional novelist or breaking into film, were nothing compared to a life with my wife and our children.

And even within that more practical way of life, one makes choices for family rather than ambition or dreams. I turned down a job prospect this week, a prospect that would have meant a raise and a company that put a lot more emphasis on the kind of analytical work that I do, but would have meant moving our family to another city, tearing up roots and moving away from friends. There's a slight wistfulness to such decisions, but it's not something I regret. The fact is, my career does not consist of following my dreams. I work my career in order to pay for the welfare of my family. And that love -- of spouse, of children -- is a far greater thing than all the self striving I could ever do.

Why shouldn't fairy tales end with finding love? My beloved is, after all, the best thing that has ever happened to me. What better happy ending will we find?