Happliy Ever After... Short Changed

Sometimes, when I think about love, marriage, and everything I believed my life would become, I feel ripped off.

There—I said it.

Growing up, I watched fairy tales and romantic movies such as Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, and Sixteen Candles. Although the stories were different, the message I received was almost always the same: eventually, the girl gets the guy of her dreams.

Period.

She might be mistreated, overlooked, lonely, trapped, misunderstood, or caught in one crisis after another, but somehow the handsome prince—or the boy she had been hoping for—would arrive. He would recognize something special in her. He would choose her, rescue her, and carry her away from the pain she had endured.

Then came the beautiful dress, the romantic kiss, the wedding, and the promise that they would live happily ever after.

As a little girl, I believed it.

Why wouldn’t I?

No one sat me down and explained that those stories were fantasies. No one told me that real relationships could be complicated, painful, confusing, and sometimes deeply disappointing. My parents did not tell me anything different. The movies did not show the arguments after the wedding, the unhealed childhood wounds, the financial disagreements, the betrayal, the emotional distance, or the possibility that the prince might not come at all.

I grew up believing that if I became a good woman, lived responsibly, worked hard, treated people well, and kept believing in love, eventually my story would come together.

But when I became an adult, it went nothing like that.

There was no clear path from “once upon a time” to “happily ever after.” Instead, there seemed to be one heartbreak after another. There were relationships that began with promise but ended in disappointment. There were people who said the right things but lacked the character to live by their words. There were moments when love appeared to be close, only for it to disappear without warning.

Each heartbreak took something with it.

One took a little innocence. Another took trust. Another forced me to question my judgment. Some made me wonder whether I had overlooked warning signs, expected too much, accepted too little, or simply chosen the wrong person. After enough disappointment, it became difficult not to ask the painful question:

What is wrong with me?

The older I became, the harder dating seemed to get. The dating pool became smaller, but the emotional baggage became larger. People arrived with past marriages, unresolved relationships, children, financial obligations, trust issues, grief, disappointment, and sometimes decades of habits they had no intention of changing.

And it was not happening only to me.

I watched my friends struggle too.

Some of my friends are now in their forties and have never been married or had children. Some deeply desired both. They did not reject marriage. They did not spend their lives avoiding commitment. They simply never met the right person at the right time under the right circumstances.

Others married, believed they had found their forever, had children, built homes, and created families—only to find themselves divorced and trying to rebuild lives they once believed were secure.

We encouraged one another through breakups, divorces, disappointments, and birthdays that came with unspoken questions. We attended weddings smiling while privately wondering whether our own moment would ever arrive. We celebrated new relationships while remembering how many of our own had ended.

Sometimes the statistics make the pain feel even heavier.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 47.5% of Black women were never married in 2020, compared with 30% of women overall. The increase was dramatic: in 1970, 27.7% of Black women had never married.

A Bureau of Labor Statistics study that followed Americans born between 1957 and 1964 found that by age 55, 28% of Black women had never married, compared with 12% of Hispanic women and 7% of White women in that cohort. The same research found that Black adults who did marry were also more likely than White adults in the study to have experienced divorce by that age.

Those numbers are not merely percentages on a page.

Behind every statistic is a woman.

A woman who may have prayed for a husband.

A woman who may have wanted children but watched her reproductive years pass while waiting for a committed relationship.

A woman who remained faithful to her values while watching other people move into the lives she once imagined for herself.

A woman who became educated, built a career, purchased a home, cared for aging parents, raised children alone, served her church, supported her community, and became the person everyone else could depend upon—while quietly wondering who would ever be there for her.

That is the part the fairy tales never showed us.

They never showed the woman who had to rescue herself.

They never showed her crying privately and then getting up the next morning to go to work. They never showed her changing the tire, paying the mortgage, handling the emergency, making the medical decision, raising the child, moving the furniture, or figuring out life without a prince standing beside her.

They never showed the strength required to build a meaningful life while carrying the disappointment of a dream that had not come true.

But perhaps the greatest harm of the fairy tale was not that it made us believe in love. Believing in love is not foolish. The harm was that it sometimes taught us to believe that being chosen by a man would be the moment our real lives began.

It suggested that the wedding was the victory.

It made singleness look like the problem and marriage look like the rescue.

It taught us to wait for someone else to recognize our worth instead of understanding that our worth had already been established by God.

When the prince did not come—or when the man who came behaved nothing like a prince—we were left trying to understand what had gone wrong. Some women blamed themselves. Some lowered their standards. Some remained in unhealthy relationships because being mistreated seemed less frightening than being alone. Some gave too much, stayed too long, forgave without accountability, or accepted inconsistent affection because they were still trying to reach that promised ending.

I still believe in love.

I still believe in healthy marriages, faithful companionship, and the beauty of two people building a life together. I do not believe that every relationship is destined to fail or that every man is incapable of commitment.

But I no longer believe that marriage is a magical conclusion to a woman’s story.

A husband is not a savior.

A wedding is not proof of a woman’s worth.

Singleness is not evidence that God has forgotten her.

Divorce does not mean that her life is over.

And statistics, however painful, are not prophecies over our individual futures.

The truth is that some of us did not receive the lives we pictured as little girls. We may need permission to grieve that honestly. Grief does not mean we are ungrateful. It means something mattered to us. We can love God, appreciate our lives, recognize our blessings, and still admit that an unanswered prayer hurts.

Christ does not ask us to pretend that we never wanted marriage. He does not require us to act as though loneliness never touches us or that disappointment never becomes exhausting. He invites us to bring those feelings to Him—the anger, the confusion, the unmet expectations, and even the moments when we feel ripped off.

Surrendering to Christ does not mean giving up on love. It means refusing to make marriage the condition upon which we agree to live fully.

It means releasing the belief that our lives are incomplete until someone chooses us. It means allowing God to heal the places where rejection damaged our confidence and disappointment distorted our identity. It means trusting that even when our stories do not resemble the fairy tales, they can still contain purpose, beauty, love, joy, and redemption.

Perhaps no prince came to rescue us.

But Christ did.

He did not come to place us inside a fantasy. He came to give us truth, identity, purpose, and eternal life. He came to remind us that we were already seen, already known, already loved, and already chosen.

Our stories may not end with glass slippers, enchanted castles, or the words “happily ever after.”

But they are not over.

And with Christ, they are never without hope.

By Vonda Li