The Cinderella Syndrome

The Cinderella syndrome is so commonplace in our minds that it is regarded as the norm. A “nothing special” girl is transformed and meets a “super special” boy. They fall in love…get married…have babies…and live happily ever after. The End.

This pretty much spells out the hopes and dreams of every little girl that ever was. We are fooling ourselves if we think we haven’t found ourselves traveling down this path in our minds at some time or another. Every one of us has hoped for our Prince Charming to come sweep us off our feet and change the course of our life forever.

As Ravi Zacharias puts it, “Some of our most important decisions are made before we ever utter a word of commitment to another.” Our decisions are made in our fantasies as we allow them to play out in our minds and tint the world as it really is!

Fairy tales have the illusion of perfect. We come to expect this perfection in ourselves and in those we associate with. Once we have gotten our “perfect” little self together and married our “perfect” guy, we’ll have the “perfect” life and raise “perfect” little babies. Before we know it, reality comes crashing in and our “perfect” little world is shattered and we find ourselves sitting amongst the ruins.

I love how Webster defines illusion…perception of something objectively existing in such a way as to cause misinterpretation of its actual nature. Don’t you see it? We take love, something we know as objectively existing because God refers to it repeatedly in the Bible, and perceive it in such a way that we sorely misinterpret its actual nature.

I am convinced this happens because we allow so many counterfeit authors to pen our stories. We consciously and subconsciously allow ourselves to be influenced by many in the development of our love stories. We are tricked by…

1) Ourselves ~ We manipulate people and circumstances to fit our own desires and need for a happy ending.
2) Books and Movies ~ The media does more to destroy marriages than just about any other means possible. We feed our insatiable need for romance through both of these and then wonder why our actual life is left wanting.
3) Other married couples ~ We look at what we can see outwardly in other couples without knowing all the intricacies of relationship that go on behind closed doors. All that glitters is not gold…sometimes it is fool’s gold. We are tricked into believing that what we see is the real thing when, in all actuality, it is merely a perfectly placed mask used to disguise the pain of dreams never realized.

Love was God’s idea! Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God…” God was the original Author of our story and anything that deviates from His story line is fantasy and has no basis in reality. Love between a man and a woman was His creation and He defines what it is and how it is to be played out. When we choose to deviate from His plan is when we start walking amid the mine fields, stumbling along a random path while hoping we don’t get blown up in the process!