Harry Potter As a Metaphor for Life
Posted by limpetfan | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on 17-06-2008-05-2008
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Professor “Mad-Eye” Moody once said to Harry Potter and his classmates: “Now here’s the rub: how do we sort out the liars?” He was speaking, of course, of the Imperius Curse, which allows dark wizards to control whomever they like, and of how much trouble it is for the Ministry of Magic to figure out who has actually been put under this curse and who is merely using it as an excuse for their deplorable actions.
It occurs to me that this problem comes up in our relationships on a daily basis, which is probably why JK Rowling made such a big deal of it in the Harry Potter series.
Women have been trained from a very young age to expect certain things from romantic relationships. I call it Cinderella Syndrome. It goes like this: you meet a guy, you fall for him, he falls for you, and then you live happily ever after. We go through childhood expecting this. And many of us become disillusioned after we go through one or two or ten break-ups and it becomes clear that happily ever after is not always a given. Add in the constant media barrage of classic lines designed to make us believe fairy tale love is everywhere (ie: “You had me at hello.”) and it’s no wonder it can frequently become difficult to distinguish the men who are being genuine from the men who know what sounds good – the “liars”.
So how do we sort them out? Is there some sort of paradigm for telling the good ones from the bad ones? Or do actions truly speak louder than words in these cases?
Furthermore, I once received the following piece of advice: if you go into a relationship with the idea that it’s untrustworthy, it’s blemished from the start, so why bother? Either give it the benefit of the doubt or forget about it altogether. While this is good advice, I can’t help but wonder if this kind of thinking isn’t favorable to the liars. If the reason so many women are jaded is because we aren’t correctly identifying the imperii and are subsequently walking away with the stub end of the stick, is it possible that the best policy is to only believe actions and discount the words?
And where is love in all this? Have we really become so cynical that when someone does come along who personifies the fairy tale we can’t accept it? What has happened to the burning, passionate, can’t-live-without-each-other love they had back in the days of Casablanca? It seems we have accepted that we will never have this type of love, so we settle for whatever’s lying around.
Am I the only one who is looking for – and believes in – “butterflies” – consuming, inconvenient, it-doesn’t-make-any-sense-and-that’s-why-I-trust-it love? Probably not. But again, I can’t help but wonder if it’s this kind of thinking that tends hand hopeful women everywhere the crappy end of the stick.
© 2008, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.
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Oh my…………..
First of all, I must say that whoever gave you that advice about going into a relationship with the idea that it’s untrustworthy and all must be an utter GENIUS!
Second, I should point out that Casablanca was still a movie and there was still a lot of stickiness in love even back in the 1940s.
Love is a crap-shoot. Sometimes you make it sometimes you don’t. And even when you find the person who’s gonna love you back it’s still a crap-shoot. And I think more often than not we focus on the dice not rolling in our favor because when you’re in the heat of the moment you can hardly look beyond what’s happening to you and see what’s happening around you.
And you kind of forgot about the part in Cinderella where the evil step-mother and step-sisters rip up Cinderella’s dress for the ball, force her into servitude, lock her in the tower, and try to steal Prince Charming from her. And while Prince Charming did love Cinderella, if the Fairy God-Mother hadn’t have come along to help Cinderella out, he probably would have married one of the step-sisters and just gone about his merry way. And since last time I checked, Fairy God-Mother’s went extinct back around the 11th century, we modern-day Cinderella’s have to rely on our own smarts and tactful decisions to create our own luck.
Anyway… just remember….
Love = Crap-shoot
There is an old sagacious saying: trust but verify.
The implication here is that it is important to enter into a relationship with the faith that the object of your passion is being sincere. And that you should not just assume that they going to fulfill your expectations of whom you think they are.
Granted one should get to know the other before they invest their emotions and time into a making a fruitful relationship. But I suppose good liars can trick one into gaining the others trust.
So how do you verify? Well, like many things in life there are no easy answers, but I am a firm believer in communication—or at least trying to communicate– with one another. If some one is being evasive or vague, well to me that is a red flag. Consistency is also important. But even more important than communication, as Christina has pointed out, is actions; they speak far more loudly than words, although I am sure liars can be deceitful in there actions as well, which is why you need to keep a conduit for communication open. Liars will eventually get caught.
In my opinion, the reason so many relationships don’t work is because of our inherent inability in communicating with the opposite sex.
Also, I don’t believe in love at first sight and I certainly don’t believe in fairy tales. Fairy tales are far-fetched fictional stories meant to inspire, but are not grounded in reality. And I don’t believe in love at first sight, because it reinforces the superficial and shallow nature of most people consumed by image. How can you fall in love with a by-product of our consumer society, which tricks some into thinking that the image being marketed to them makes them unique?
Relationships are difficult because of the complexities of human nature. We each have egos and character flaws that may not enable us to act or think in the way we really want. Moreover, great relationships can only come from compromising, something few people have the ability to do.
But when it comes to liars, the question you would need to ask yourself is why would that person want to lie. Often times I think liars—men and women alike—lie as a means of controlling or manipulating the situation in their favor.
So, if it seems like all the control is in the other, than you may want to distance yourself and focus your energies on what make you happy.
@wcm: OF COURSE the person who gave me that advice is an utter genius!
And to that effect, I think friends have replaced fairy godmothers – at least since circa 2000!
@aadler04: I have a huge problem with the concept of “trust but verify.” A statement like that implies explicit DISTRUST. Why verify something when you trust it?
Good liars are good at maintaining their lies over long periods of time, so I doubt any verification process would sort out the liar before it’s too late, and someone ends up breaking something (limb, heart, inherent trust in humanity -take your pick).
I tend to agree that communication is key with this. I think that’s why books like “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” are so wildly popular.
On a separate note, I happen to have a very dear friend who turned to me about 4 hours after meeting her now-fiancee and informed me she believed she had met the man she would marry. Love at first sight? Maybe, maybe not – but there’s a gut instinct if I ever saw one.
Christina, in my mind, when you meet someone, you should trust that they are sincerely interested in you as a means for establishing a comfort level in which to build a solid foundation, which can be use as a guide as to whether or not someone’s trust needs to be verified. In my experience, more often than not, trust needs to be verified at some point before a relationship can proceed to a more serious level.
Also, I don’t think that someone is going to lie for long periods of time. If they do, then they are pathological and need help. Moreover, I can’t imagine anyone being completely fooled by someone who is not being genuine. I suppose that if you fell for someone at first sight your judgment and perceptions may be clouded, but many red flags will rise; the question is whether or not you are going to make excuses for that person.
It takes time to get to know someone, and I believe you only truly know someone until you go thru a crisis with that person; only then can you see someone for who they really are.
Last, I too had a friend who knew right away that the person they just met was going to be his wife. In my experience, however, this only happens when both people are ready for a lasting commitment of trust, which I believe is as rare as life in the universe…
So, I’m reminded of a quote from a Target bathroom stall after reading some of the exchanges here. Normally, I think that bathroom stall graffiti is quite vulgar and not particularly insightful, but this one stuck with me.
I feel it’s appropriate for me to share.
“Love at first sight is not love at all.”
You know what’s funny?
My traditional role is the cynic. No one who knows me thinks I believe in fairy tale romance. I don’t think it exists. I, of course, always allow for the possibility that someone can prove me wrong. But it hasn’t happened yet. So I’m usually the one giving the cynical argument.
Whitney – DUDE – when the heck did the roles switch?!
Much to the chagrin of those who live me and whom I live, I have never believed in love at first sight and I only barely believe in soul mates. I would necessarily call myself a cynic because I discount the idea of a glass slipper leading you to your prince charming. Rather I consider myself much more of a realist when it comes to love.
Love and relationships are almost never 50-50. They’re more like 60-40 or 70-30; and you’re not always going to be the 60 or the 70. But that doesn’t make relationships inherently bad, nor does it make me cynical.
I just put more stock in a nicely mowed lawn than I do a romantic candle lit dinner.
[...] can actually sabotage real-life relationships, so I had high hopes for this movie. (See blogs here and here if you are curious about my opinions on fairy-tale love [...]