“True love” is sexist propaganda

“The one” is an oppressive nightmare.

In the ideal fairytale romance where are you? Behind the white picket fence, in the white two story home, where do you lie? As a woman, I can identify myself easily. I am the wife in the kitchen. I am the mom tucking her kids to bed. I am in the backyard on my knees, tending to the garden. Where does a man see himself? Nowhere, probably.

The idealized romantic images we’ve been raised on are nearly exclusively made for women and girls. Everything from Cinderella to The Notebook were not written with an expectation of a predominantly, or even a 50%, male audience. Not because women are generally more interested in these stories but because these stories function as propaganda. Propaganda the patriarchy has no need to use on men.

Under a patriarchy, women are raised to be subservient to men. This service manifests mostly in the home, in child-raising and in community building. From this, men gain the invaluable labor of having someone take care of them and their kids. How men encourage women to continuously engage in this system is to romanticize it–literally.

When you’ve found “the one”, being kept within the home is not a prison sentence, it’s true love. Believing in “the one” makes it so that no matter what you’re doing in your life, you’re ready to drop it to be with a man. You’re not seeing it as you disrupting your life to serve a man, you see it as you choosing your true love.

“The one” reinforces the idea that women are made for men. The fairytale romance has a sort of spiritual otherworldly quality. God, or the universe, or whoever, set a part of that person for you and is inviting you into that showtopping love.

If you were to reject this mystical invitation to mind bogglingly beautiful romance, you will regret it for the rest of your life. You’ll be just like all the other romance movie characters who are eternally depressed because of “the one that got away”. No one could decline such a grand invite from God himself. Once again, all “the one” has made you do is force you to be with a man.

Obviously, “the one” is a fundamentally false idea. People aren’t “meant” for you in some divine existential sense. It’s a hard pill to swallow but there is no worldwide true love database. But in addition to that, it’s also deeply harmful. As a woman, you don’t exist perpetually in the pews waiting to find the man that will complete you.

Romantic stories work to encourage women to accept their subjugation by romanticizing it. By making girls and women believe in–and wait for–“the one” they’re eternally prepared to serve whatever man might enter their midst.

This can be a genuinely devastating thing to come to terms with if you’re still in love with the idea of “the one” but it’s deeply important that as women we construct a sense of self and excitement in the future that is not based on the patriarchal confides we’ve been given. It’s just as fun and sexy to be single and pursuing your goals as it is to be in love. It is fun and sexy to be whole.