We have all gone to bed as a child with the freshly-told fairy tale story still bubbling in our mind. Marcia Lieberman has criticized fairy tales as conditioning girls into becoming submissive women who believe that beauty and docility are the only traits that are rewarded in life, but in her essay “Some Day My Prince Will Come”, she also points out something very interesting about romantic love itself. Most fairy tales end with the “happily ever after” clause, but these same fairy tales almost always have the protagonist come from a broken family. Either one of the parents is dead, missing, or there is an evil step-parent. These fairy tales imply that romantic love leads to happy marriages and yet all the families that they portray are broken. The paradox of love in fairy tales is that everyone ends up happily ever after, but no one seems to be happy. The “happily ever after” of love is always emphasized, but never shown.
via nickyee.com