Once upon a time, in the tangled woods of our collective imagination, fairytales whispered sweet nothings about love that would echo for centuries.
These fantastical stories, often beginning with fateful meetings and ending with 'happily ever after,' have shaped how we understand romance, desire, and the search for emotional fulfillment.
But at their core, fairytales serve as cultural blueprints for emotional development, often imprinting the ideals of love during childhood.
What Can Theory Tell Us About Love & Fairytales?
Bruno Bettelheim, the psychoanalyst famous for 'The Uses of Enchantment', argued that these tales help children grapple with their fears and desires through symbolic storytelling.
But the influence of fairytales extends far beyond bedtime stories.
They have seeped into our collective unconscious, a term Carl Jung popularised to describe shared archetypal images inherited across cultures.
Jung would have us believe that the maiden-in-distress or the heroic prince reflects universal patterns of human experience. Love, in this context, is not just an emotion but a narrative structure, echoing through myths, art, and modern rom-coms.
The Feminist Bit
Fairytales are far from innocent in their portrayals of love. Feminist critics have highlighted how these stories shape problematic expectations around passivity and reward.They often reinforce troubling ideas about romantic fulfilment and gender roles. Take Disney’s early classics: Snow White, Aurora, and Cinderella, all passively await rescue by a prince, implying that love is something bestowed rather than built.
Attachment Theory
Attachment theory adds another layer of psychological insight into fairytales and love.
John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth explored how our early bonds with caregivers shape adult relationships. Securely attached children, like Belle from Beauty and the Beast, navigate relationships with curiosity and trust. But anxious or avoidant patterns, often mirroring fairytale dilemmas, can manifest as fear of abandonment (Rapunzel) or emotional distance (The Ice Queen).
Are We Starting to Let Go of these Stories?
Interestingly, modern retellings of fairytales have started to deconstruct these rigid love narratives.
Shrek mocks the idea of physical perfection and Frozen champions sisterly love over romantic infatuation.
This shift mirrors cultural movementstoward self-discoveryand relational autonomy, influenced by thinkers like Erich Fromm who, in 'The Art of Loving', argued that love was not just a feeling but an active skill developed through self-awareness and empathy.
So, why do fairytales still haunt our ideas of love?
Well, partly because they simplify complex emotional realities into digestible stories.
Love becomes a quest, a test, a reward for a sense of worth or resilience.
Yet, as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would remind us, love is often entangled with fantasy. Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage — where the self is fragmented and seeks unity through external validation — echoes in how we seek completion in romantic partners, as if they were the missing piece to our emotional puzzles.
Do They Still Hold Any Value Today?
The real magic of fairytales, perhaps, lies not in their surface narratives but in their symbolism.
They speak to the universal human longing for connection, security, and transformation.
They remind us that love is both a personal journey and a shared myth, shaped by centuries of storytelling and psychological exploration.
Love, as fairytales teach us, is never just about the prince or the kiss—it’s about the stories we tell to make sense of our own hearts.