In the fairy tale, “The Sleeping Beauty”, the heroine is saved from seemingly endless sleep by a kiss from the handsome prince, who whisks her away to his palace where they live happily ever after. This same idea is portrayed in “Snow White” and in countless other stories. Even in our modern times, many films and novels continue to follow a similar plot concept.The majority of us grow up believing the false information given to us by television, radio, film and the printed word that something or someone can rescue us from our mundane lives and turn us into all that we want to be. Even our parents give us the impression that the right person will make everything just fine. Young women dress up like fairy princesses in white lacy dresses on their wedding day, propagating this myth even further.
Why, then, do so many people seem discontented in their marriages and relationships? Why do people divorce and then often remarry to someone who resembles their previous partner? This is because they remain the same within — and like attracts like. So, they will go on and on attracting the same unsatisfactory relationships for as long as they continue to live with the same old attitudes.
When a person begins to work on changing himself from within, he will start to attract different types of people into his life. The junkie who is still using drugs is going to associate with other drug users. When he reforms himself and starts to change his attitudes, we notice him associating with a different sort of person. This is because he is changing from within.
Most people think of love as some sort of power outside of themselves that will “take them away from all of this.” Sadly, that is not the case. Love exists only within our own hearts and to have happy relationships, we must first become truly loving people. And as we fill our hearts with love by expressing love toward all people in thought, word and deed (faking it till we make it happen, if necessary), then that love will heal our own lives, help to solve our problems and enable us to feel good about ourselves. The need for a partner to rescue us will disappear; instead we will attract whole, loving people into our lives and when the time is ripe for a relationship it will be one between two whole, emotionally healthy people coming together to give to each other rather than to take from each other.
In his famous prayer, St. Francis asks that he may seek rather “to love than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.” So, too, it has been our experience that it is by loving that we are loved; it is by being the right person that we find the right person.
