Hope and illusion first, disappointment and disenchantment then. Only once disenchanted, you can genuinely love and feel loved.
Deep in our hearts, we hope to find someone beautiful on the inside and outside. If and when it happens, since we don’t know them enough, we start to project our needs, dreams, and expectations on some kind of strangers. Most of the time, these projections have nothing to do with the person we fall in love with.
We tend to believe that everything is perfect, but it’s just an illusion of ours. As soon as the other shows their true colors – and we don’t like what we see – we feel disappointed. The truth is that they are not responsible for our reactions since pretty much all the chemistry we were feeling was something our minds made up.
Disenchantment is to realize that quite a few of our beliefs and expectations are pretty unrealistic and impossible to meet. If you believe that some other person can be the means for you to fulfill your needs, make your life easier and happier, you’d better wake up, Cinderella dear.
Love and relationships are way different from the romantic fairy tales we grew up with. We dreamed of and hoped for that kind of love, and ended up pretty disappointed once we found out it was just an illusion, one of the many tricks our minds like to play on us.
From now on, let’s enjoy the pleasure of disenchantment. The reality we often ignore exceeds expectations sometimes.
Alessandro Cozzolino, LGBTQ+ coach
