You can be your own soulmate, and that’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard
Avery Nowicki (She/Her) // Contributor
Talia Rouck // Illustrator
You’re six or seven, plopped onto the living room carpet, fixated on the big box TV. You can hear the signature Disney fireworks pop in your ears as they surround that familiar magic castle. You listen as the symphony begins and you are welcomed into a fairytale. You watch in awe as this picturesque world comes to life, portraying what will soon be your idealized view on hetero-normative romance.
Sure, as you age, this viewpoint will grow more cynical and realistic. You’ll turn to reality TV, where you’ll watch bombshell Brits in bikinis fight over various renditions of wonderbread men with washboard abs. You’ll side eye them, feeling that little tingle of pride bubbling up from not being as desperate as they are. And still, you will binge every episode within a weekend, and might be left feeling exclusion and a hint of panic about one day having to search for your own version of that One True Love.
I am so guilty of feeding into this addictive fantasy that even though I know it’s patriarchal bullshit, I will never stop watching. Popular media has pushed this belief that we need someone else to fix us, and we can never simply be our own soulmates. This self-fulfilling life without a need for partnership and eventual mating negatively benefits our society’s capitalist and patriarchal ideals.
It’s difficult to discuss my hatred for romantic pressure without fully letting my feminist rage rush into over-drive; however, I do think it’s necessary. At the end of this mysterious life, we really only have ourselves. Our brains are the only definite constant on which we can rely. Our purest form of self is that which resides within us. It holds so much value, and we can mold it into whoever we wish, taking it anywhere, like a squishy pink keepsake of our true selves.
Inside these brains resides all the truths we need to inhabit the open-world video game we call life. Our only necessary goal on earth is to see how much we can explore and how many personalities we can collect before time runs out. In a way, it’s poetic (and slightly morbid). This relationship we have with our own minds is unlike most connections we will form throughout our time, in this real-world version of “The Sims.”
Romance is a fascinating part of our journey. However, to let the search for this unrealistically high standard of a “perfect” partner is to set oneself up for disappointment. Disney’s princess movies have ingrained this mindset into our heads since we were toddlers, telling us that true love is the answer to all of life’s issues. In order to achieve heaven on earth, women and femmes must follow the colonial beauty standard to a T. Perfect eurocentric features, an extremely slim body, and a level of submission horrifyingly mirroring that of a child. They must woo men with their soft, hyper-feminine singing voices and housewife abilities, all in the hopes that a strong, brutish white man with a beastly buff body-type and a brooding controlling side can provide for them. They’re taught to give them everything they could ever want, like a protector to a dependent.
That is not partnership, or true love in any way. That idea of romance perpetuates countless harmful traits in young children, causing them to grow into adults with stunted views on reality, aging, and dependency. This can cause us to idolize reality show competitions like Too Hot to Handle, Love is Blind, and Love Island. It’s easy to get stuck in a cycle of romanticizing the love shown on screen and wish for something similar. Ultimately, this can lead to seeking them out as the newest way to confirm our hidden biases toward unhealthy power dynamics in adult partnerships.
I am not suggesting that we all go off and marry our craniums. However, I do strongly believe that our worth should not be deemed by the criteria that companies like Disney and Netflix perpetuate. We do not fit into tightly enclosed boxes of hetero-normativity and marital dominance, and it’s a box we have tried to shove ourselves into for far too long. Our minds and our individual abilities are stronger than any need to conform to societal pressures. If we allow ourselves the freedom to truly explore our honest ideas of what the “One (or more) True Love(s)” could look like, we could be opening our horizons to a far more fulfilling life.
