The Tao of Love and Fairytales

Nov. 4th, 2023

When I was a little girl I loved the old Walt Disney fairytales. The movies I loved all involved a dark and difficult journey for the leading character, but there was always a kind of beautiful and magical happy ending.

However I soon found that those fairytale endings were only on the silver screen or on my TV set, and that real life was filled with challenge after challenge, especially in personal relationships. And I found that the world blamed these fairytale endings on the relationship problems of the western world - it created expectations that were too high, unrealistic, and no one can live up to them. And so it became clear that pretty little fairytales were simply pretty little lies. So fairytale stories were erased from the real world.

In 1994 right after high school, I was in my first relationship, my first apartment in the East Village, and my first real job on the books. Also around that time I started reading about Taoism.

Taoists talk about the path of least resistance, to be like water. When the river flows and there are boulders and rocks and various other obstacles in the way, water simply moves around them or on top of them or underneath them, never stopping to fight them, never resisting them. It is flexible and flowing. When I was a teenager in my first relationship, I remember it sounded like simply falling in love and letting yourself be carried down the stream. Not exactly a fairytale but close enough to my childhood fantasies. But after almost three years that relationship ended.

My next relationship started in 1997, and over the next 8 years, was filled with challenge after challenge. And that’s when I figured out that you can’t just fall. Relationships are work. Therapists, spiritual gurus, motivational speakers, all shared their various tactics on how to adjust yourself and make it work. The idea is that if you put enough work into it the union should be a success. It appeals to the workaholic culture that we have cultivated, and I was always a good workhorse so I was up for the challenge.

But even the gods and goddesses of Greek myths couldn’t sustain healthy relationships. The psychological archetypes were fraught with betrayal and infidelity and greed and envy.

In 2008 when I started at the Kabbalah Center, they also reinforced the idea of hard work, but it was spiritual hard work, and they taught us the “technology” that was needed for relationship success. To work through the generational karma and personal Tikkun and to start the process of spiritual expansion. After that I thought I cracked the code and learned the formula, and so I embarked on my next decade of Love.

Philosophers Bell Hooks and Erich Fromm describe love itself as a verb instead of a noun, and turns it into a decision, a choice, a judgment to be made. There’s an art to it. So these amazing writings provide another manual for relationship success. They are thoughtful and informative but somehow I was always left feeling like all this analyzing, all these words, were pushing against the stream, highlighting a struggle to attain something that should be so simple and pure and natural. Even the Kabbalah highlights that the spiritual work is difficult. But I wanted to know why it was so difficult. So I started to think back to the Tao and the flowing river water over rocks and boulders and I understood it in a different way this time than I had when I was seventeen.

At that time, my takeaway was that Taoism was to simply go with the flow, to be flexible. But really the ‘path of least resistance’ is being true to your authentic self. The river doesn’t judge itself as we do. It doesn’t make a decision to like itself, or not. And if it gets muddled or dirty, it’s still happy to keep moving and have unconditional love for its authentic self. And I guess the difficult part for so many people is all about getting distracted and pulled away from the true authentic nature, away from that delicate deep integrity that we hold in our hearts.

In all the fairytales the two counterparts go on their separate journeys. They go through darkness or confusion and eventually truth and clarity. In the end, the true essence of that individual unfolds, recalling the childlike innocence and purity that connects them with their true selves, their authentic nature, that which makes them uniquely who they are.

I think the opening song of Cinderella is actually quite profound and quite Taoist. I love that the heart’s healing happens when you’re asleep, the only time you’re truly in a Taoist state of mind of doing nothing, not struggling, or fighting, just completely letting go.

The lyrics describe dreams as “a wish your heart makes when you’re fast asleep” so your true self is in your heart, buried underneath all the layers of fear and sadness, and it makes a wish and heals your heartache. And “no matter how your heart is grieving” no matter what you’ve had to deal with throughout your life, it renews your faith so when you wake up, the bright sun and the dark rain have come together to make a pretty rainbow because your dream has come true.

So maybe we have a backwards. People race into the honeymoon phase, a pink cloud, the fairytale dream. And then after a short amount of time, reality sets in, and the rest of the relationship is work. Instead the fairytale shows the opposite - believing in the self first, basically cultivating self-empowerment, personal sovereignty, accepting and appreciating and honoring the authentic self. And then the reward is to be united with the other half of their soul. I think that’s the secret to Psyche and Eros - the one Greek Mythological couple that does not struggle with betrayal, infidelity, greed, or envy. I’d say this is the happily-ever-after fairytale of Greek fables.

Eros and Psyche each journeyed through their inner healing separately before coming together to love each other unconditionally. And although they were given tests and challenges that looked on the surface to be too difficult to overcome, the solutions were actually quite simple - to not be distracted by the obstacles, the negative words and agendas of others, and to let go and have trust and faith in the self.

So I think fairytales may have it right. Fairytale love is the key to relationships. I think children know this secret. And that’s why they love fairytales...