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Almost all of us grew up with the same story. A grey life that is transformed when someone appears —a prince, a rescue— and, all at once, everything makes sense. Cinderella is not just a children’s tale: it is one of the molds with which we learned to imagine love. And though it may seem harmless, that mold leaves a mark worth looking at —above all when it organizes, without our noticing, the way we look for a partner.

A tale that was not entirely ours

The script has an origin: it is heteropatriarchal, written for other roles —the one who waits, the one who rescues. And yet it also colonizes the desire of many gay men, who grew up with the same films and the same songs. So, without having chosen it, one is left waiting for «the one»: the figure who, on arriving, would come to complete what is missing. A promise is imported that was not even made for this life.

Happiness as an upgrade

The heart of the myth is an idea: that happiness comes from outside, almost like an update. As if fullness were preinstalled in the right partner and it were enough to find them for life to «start». Placed this way, satisfaction always remains in a beyond —the next match, the next love— that never quite arrives. And there is a silent cost: the subject washes his hands of his own desire, delegates it. He waits to be rescued instead of asking himself what he wants, what is happening to him, what he repeats.

The prince who does not arrive (or who leaves)

That is why encounters so often disappoint: no one can be the upgrade. The concrete person is assigned an impossible role —that of completing another—, and when he does not fulfill it, disenchantment follows. Sometimes the other leaves, in part, because he was invited to occupy a place that was not his. The tale promised an ending; life, instead, asks for a construction.

Dismantling the tale without renouncing love

None of this is an argument against love. On the contrary: it is about rescuing it from the myth. Dismantling Cinderella does not mean ceasing to desire a bond, but ceasing to expect it as a rescue. It is to move satisfaction from the «beyond» to the present, and to turn the other back into a person —not a solution. That work is neither quick nor has a formula; but as the script becomes visible, it stops governing the scene. And love, freed from the impossible task of saving us, becomes at last possible.

Perhaps amorous maturity begins there: the day one stops waiting for the prince and asks oneself, seriously and without haste, what one truly desires. Not to renounce the encounter, but to be able to sustain it when it arrives —not as a rescue, but as an encounter between two who no longer need to be saved.

Carlos Hernán Arango Botero — Psychologist