Realistic love: Contemporary college women’s negotiations of princess culture and the “reality” of romantic relationships

Abstract

This manuscript examines the ways collegiate women perceive media portrayals of princess cultural scripts and how this impacts their constructions of romantic relationships. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with college-aged women, we explore how these women negotiated media portrayals of romantic love by (1) distancing from images they defined as unrealistic expectations and (2) selectively embracing media portrayals as revealing intimate relational ideals. We argue that their selective accounting for how they developed their definitions of “realities” of love exposes tensions in concurrently hegemonic conceptions of love: idealist (fantastical and emotional love) and realist (rational and practical love) needed to sustain long-term relationships. We suggest that these negotiations reveal an association of idealist love with youth and realist love with maturity, reflecting an ongoing privileging of realist love. We conclude by considering interconnections between late capitalistic ideologies and maturation.

Keywords

Princess culture romantic love romantic relationships young women

Romantic love is historically feminized (Cancian, 1986), with contemporary gender socialization continuing to advance “females’ preoccupation with love and interpersonal relationships” (Simon, Eder, & Evans, 1992, p. 30). Moreover, contemporary dialogues express concern for a “princess problem” (Hains, 2014) or “princess syndrome” (Hartstein, 2012a, 2012b), in which girls grow into young women who negotiate life as though it is a fairytale. Such perspectives argue this “girlie-girl” culture encourages girls’ obsession with pretty and pink things, looks, consumerism, and a knight in shining armor leading to a happily ever after (Orenstein, 2012).

While the impact of a “princess syndrome” on young women’s ideas surrounding love and romance remains relatively unknown, authors, theorists, researchers, and parents nevertheless express a concern that fairytales will influence girls to grow up into women living in a false reality, searching for romantic relationships based in commodified goods and/or finding a Prince Charming to take care of them. It is therefore necessary to examine young women’s own interpretations of princess cultural scripts and how these scripts relate to their personal definitions of love and romance. The research question that accordingly guided this study was, how do collegiate women themselves negotiate conceptions of love and romance, as based in their interpretations of a princess culture and popular cultural scripts? This manuscript thus looks to examine and increase understandings as to how collegiate women perceive media portrayals of princess cultural scripts and how they critically consume popular culture in discursively making sense of romantic relationships.

Conceptualizing love

It has been argued that conceptualizations of love have evolved overtime from an idealist type of love to a more realist type of love in modern, late capitalist society (Illouz, 1991, 1997). Researchers have also maintained that the media plays an important role in the evolution and distribution of cultural scripts of love, which ultimately can impact individuals’ perceptions of romance and love (Balraj and Gopal, 2013; Hecht, 2011). We first consider arguments surrounding the sociocultural and psychological development of conceptions of love and self-development to better understand challenges emerging from the cultural terrain in which young women are negotiating definitions of love. We then review the limited research on Disney movies, as they offer insight into specific cultural scripts participants may be negotiating in this process, ascertaining the gaps emerging from research on women’s negotiations of romantic love through these shifts in the socio-cultural context.

Ideologies: Love and the self

Historically, the Victorian Era gave rise to ideologies of the self being revealed through true love, giving way in the U.S. to “idealist love” (Illouz, 1991). Idealist love can be defined as including traits of “love at first sight” (Swidler, 1980, p. 112), passionate acts, and a “clear choice” for one’s sole partner (Turner and Stets, 2005, p. 400). This form of love is closely associated with emotions and romantic fantasies of passion, as demonstrated by ideals of instantaneous love, infatuation, and couples defying social forces for the sake of their predestined, lifelong love (Giddens, 1993; Gillis, 1996; Illouz, 1997; Swidler, 1980; Turner and Stets, 2005). Such ideologies align with Lee’s (1973) research that identifies cultural scripts of loves through a typology of love styles. Specifically, Lee (1973) identifies Eros as passionate, romantic love that is accompanied by a strong physical and emotional connection, while the love style of Mania captures another portion of idealist love in terms of the yearning and infatuation felt by partners who are truly in love.

While idealist love offers a historical basis for romantic cultural scripts, scholars contend that shifts in conceptions of love have accompanied socioeconomic transitions into late capitalism. In this contemporary social context marked by a greater emphasis on self-realization and movements away from standardized life transitions, pathways into long-term relationships have been disrupted (Beck, 1992; Harris, 2004; Illouz, 1997). Arguably, a rationalized version of love developed as a part of such shifts, aligning with late capitalist ideologies encouraging “competitive individualism,” increased rationalization, and individual responsibility for constructing one’s own life chances through informed decision-making (Duggan, 2003; Giddens, 1991; Harris, 2004, p. 4; Illouz, 1997). Rationality is contrasted with the power of irrational emotions, so that unlike idealist love models (“Hollywood,” “fantasy-based”) deemed as lacking common sense, rationalist love models are espoused to “enact the phenomenological categories of everyday life experience” (Illouz 1997, p.161; Schutz, 1967).

Although using multiple terms, one can see overlaps across scholarly research on the form of rationalized love, termed confluent love by Giddens (1993) and realist by Illouz (1997). “Realist” love is found to be socially championed as practical, sustainable, grounded in a contractual model of work, and developing over time with partners’ growing knowledge of their selves (Illouz 1997, pp. 160–161). It thus also corresponds to Lee’s (1973) Pragma style of love, referring to a practical and mutually beneficial love, and Storge, focusing on friendship over passion and development over time versus instantaneously. As such, Illouz (1997, p. 163; 1991, p. 240) contended that a “romantic ethic”—the “idea that love is work”—surrounds realist love, which is based in a therapeutic ethos of self-knowledge and observation, rather than explicitly for the purposes of securing one’s self-interest. Accordingly, contemporary ideologies would then hold notions of love as instantaneous and perfect to be unrealistic, and accordingly replaced by the ideals of confluent love. These ideals support that love should develop over extended periods of time and be based in compatibility and mutual benefits (Swidler, 2001). In fact, “true love” can be seen as only existing when individuals perceive this mutual self-development as occurring.

Relatedly, the confluent love model is grounded in the notion of the “pure relationship,” based in the search for self-knowledge and identity development (Giddens, 1993), as love is looked upon for both stability and flexibility as partners strive to achieve authentic self-realization (Beck, 1992; Swidler, 1980). This is a relationship that is entered into based on personal choice with the mutual understanding that it will only last as long as both partners are satisfied, perceiving the relationship as providing appropriate levels of self-fulfillment and backing for self-actualization across partners (Giddens, 1993). This, in turn, implies that love can be controlled, so that the success and failure of intimate relationships is understood as the partners’ responsibilities. Opportunities can arise from such contractual and rationalized love because women are able to “assert themselves as equal partners” in relationships (Illouz, 1991, p. 246). However, challenges also arise—as rationalized love ethics may perpetuate women as “in charge” of love, they may then be placed in a position of greater responsibility for emotional relations, while at the same time being forced to do so through into what can be understood as Weber’s iron cage of rationality due to cultural scripts of the romantic work ethic (Illouz, 1991, p. 246).

The search for self-knowledge and identity development can be particularly salient during emerging adulthood. In the current social context, the transition to adulthood can be extended due to the lack of societal guideposts from adolescence into adulthood, known as emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000). During this stage (ranging from 18 to 25 years old), individuals strive to become an “adult” via taking responsibility for themselves, making independent decisions, and gaining financial independence (Arnett, 2000). This time is spent exploring new perspectives outside of their youth and identity development is focused on love, work, and their worldviews (Arnett, 2000, 2001). While in emerging adulthood, collegiate women can be understood as “young women,” in that they are in the process of separating from “youth”—their adolescent and early childhood selves—and into their adulthood. Arnett (2001) found that individuals consider themselves to have moved into adulthood when they are self-sufficient, self-reliant, and independent. However, further research is needed that examines how young women negotiate contemporary cultural ideologies of love within this transition, as this entails negotiating and potentially reconceptualizing the cultural scripts they grew up with in their youth.

Media portrayals and princess cultural scripts

Negotiations of media portrayals are particularly relevant, as explained by Hecht (2011), in that the media has a distinct and measurable impact on a viewer’s comprehension of reality. Furthermore, Balraj and Gopal (2013, p. 119) acknowledged that,

viewers organize knowledge about the world around them by sorting and simplifying received information via the media…viewers therefore create certain representations of the reality which in return have a significant influence on social cognition, understanding, anticipation, and emotional control.

From a social constructionist perspective, young women’s understandings of media portrayals, romantic love, and intimate relationships will be influenced by “available cultural expectations and institutional arrangements,” including that of marriage (Wilkins and Dalessandro, 2013, p. 731). Informing much work on gender identity, the social constructionist approach rejects categories put forth as essentialist features (Cerulo, 1997). Instead, socializing agents such as media are assigned great import by constructionists, as they can be understood as offering “affective, cognitive behavioral data individuals use and form a gendered self” (Cerulo, 1997, p. 387). Such cultural scripts from media can create “spheres of prescribed action and expectations” with this data being drawn from during the interactional accomplishment of gendered identities renegotiated through “linguistic exchange and social performance” (Cerulo, 1997, pp. 388, 395).

While popular literature and media offer an explicit focus on princess culture, the predominant focus of scholarly research on modern-mediated messages that encompass love ethics and scripts is on Disney movies. Although predominately limited to deductive research, previous studies observed that “females were more often depicted sexually and engaged in passive love-related roles than were males,” suggesting men as the partners controlling courses of romantic relationships (Junn, 1997, p. 2). Additional studies found that Disney films depicted happiness as obtained by finding a man (with women’s physical appearance of import), relationships as easily maintained through the image of “love at first sight,” and power differences favoring men over women (Barelds & Barelds-Dikstra, 2007; DiPirro, 2007; Tanner, Renee, Haddock, & Lund, 2003). Themes from romantic comedies also suggest they can perpetuate a princess culture, as based in findings that viewers, particularly those watching romantic comedies to learn, will uphold greater expectations for an eros love style, romantic relationships, intimacy, and that love will conquer all (Galloway, Enstrom, & Emmers-Somer, 2015; Hefner & Wilson, 2013). Based on the prevalence of these themes and reported expectations, young women may borrow heavily from popular culture, so that idealized media portrayals of love could perpetuate complications between expectations and lived experiences, as suggested by Piorkowski (2008).

While existing studies suggest women may be influenced by these stereotypes, additional research can shed light on conceptions of love in order to determine how young women relate definitions of love and romance to a princess culture, inclusive of and/or beyond such Disney-specific scripts. Accordingly, we look to answer the research question, how do collegiate women themselves negotiate conceptions of love and romance, as based in their interpretations of princess cultural scripts?

Methods

Data for this study derive from semi-structured, face-to-face interviews on young women’s gendered identity construction through their college transitions. Participants were recruited for a broader project exploring women’s definitions of a princess culture, with interview questions asking women to reflect on perceived early influences of princess culture impacting their college experiences. These in-depth interviews consisted of open-ended questions with 30 collegiate women (ages 18–24) attending a large, suburban, southern research university. Consent forms requested participants who “self-identify as a woman or female” and were at least 18 years old.

Sample

The authors used theoretical sampling (Charmaz, 2006) through a university-based recruitment effort, promoting the study to classes and student organizations. We selected classes across arts and humanities, life sciences, and social sciences, specifically recruiting from courses in Biology, Engineering, English, Nursing, and Sociology to support diversity of disciplinary focus. To support further participant diversity, we expanded from classes to recruit from student organizations that self-defined as focusing on diversity, minority, and/or gender issues. The student body is predominately Non-Hispanic White (approximately 57%), with approximately 10% African American and approximately 21% Hispanic American (any race); as our sample consists of 26% Non-Hispanic White participants, our study oversampled minority populations. By interviewing collegiate women, we capture a life stage in which individuals may be particularly reflective on the growing knowledge of selves through emerging adulthood.

Procedures

As noted in the introduction, the effects of princess cultural scripts on young women’s interpretations of romance and love remain unknown, even though concerns have been raised that they could negatively impact their ability to decipher fantasy from reality (Hartstein, 2012a, 2012b; Orenstein, 2012). To better explore this concern, we devised questions that related to topics included in the definition of princess culture (e.g., love, romance, and marriage). Accordingly in this study, four interviewers (two female professors and two female doctoral students) completed a total of 30 face-to-face interviews with collegiate women ranging from sophomores to seniors.¹ Interviews averaged 1 hour, with the longest interview lasting 3 hours. Interviews for this study were semi-structured, in that interviewers covered each question on the interview guide, but could ask them in the order most coherently following interviewees’ responses and probe with follow-up questions (Berg, 2009). Participants were given a form to complete with open-ended prompts for their major(s)/minor(s), year in school, age, race/ethnicity, and a pseudonym (optional; assigned by first author if not noted by participants); see Table 1 for the participants’ characteristics.

Table 1.

Participant characteristics.

Pseudonym	Major^a	Year	Age	Race (Ethnicity)^a
Adelie	Undeclared	1	18	Black
Audrey	Bio Medical	1	18	Hispanic
Diana	Emerging Media-Graphic Design	1	19	White/Hispanic
Amelia	International and Global Studies	2	19	White
Olivia	Biology	2	19	Hispanic (Puerto Rican)
Anya	Nursing	3	20	White
Catherine	Social Sciences	3	24	Black/Caribbean (Haitian)
Janice	Cinema Studies	3	20	White Hispanic
Tonya	Creative Writing	3	20	Hispanic
Tor	Psychology	3	19	Hispanic
Alexandria	Molecular Microbiology	4	21	Hispanic (Columbia/Cuba - born in US)
Angelina	Health Science: Pre-Clinical	4	23	Hispanic
Ashley	Anthropology	4	21	White
Gloria	Elementary Education	4	21	Mixed-Latina/White
Hannah	Psychology	4	22	Hispanic
Heather	Cultural Anthropology, Education	4	21	Multiracial (African-American/Native American/Caucasian)
Lisa	Psychology	4	21	Hispanic/White (mixed)
Lucia	Information Technology	4	23	Hispanic
Marie	Anthropology	4	21	Hispanic
Marilyn	Sociology	4	21	Latina
Melissa	Public Administration	4	24	White
Rose	Film	4	21	Black/African (Nigeria)
Samantha	Psychology	4	20	Hispanic and African-American
Sara	Criminal Justice	4	21	White (European-Belgium)
Serena	Studio Art	4	22	Black
Stephanie	Physical Therapy	4	23	Hispanic (Columbia)
Teresa	Advertising and Public Relations	4	21	Chinese and Cuban
Tia	Criminal Justice	4	21	White
Shojo^b	Film	5	22	White
Cynthia	declined to complete form

^aOpen-ended. Participants classified as Non-Hispanic White when race self-defined as “White.”

^bAll participants self-described as heterosexual except for Shojo (pansexual).

Questions drawn from for this study focused on how participants defined love and romance and comparisons between love and romance. These questions followed an initial question of “How would you define ‘princess culture’?” Subsequent questions regarding a princess culture were based on the interviewee’s definitions. These discussions, in conjunction with their descriptions of how they felt they were exposed to the princess culture growing up, often served to increase rapport prior to more personal dialogs of interpersonal relationships. Participants often gave responses reflective of narratives, which included connections to their past and current lived experiences. From an active interviewing perspective (Holstein and Gubrium, 1995, p. 46), participants’ responses reflected narratives, including background knowledge that offers “direction and precedent, connecting the researcher’s interests to the respondent’s experiences, bridging the concrete and abstract;” interviewees could thus openly explore topics, although it is understood the initial question informs the interview context (Berg, 2009). Following this, responses accordingly helped to reveal how participants situated princess narratives within and in relation to broader definitions of love and scripts proffered by media representations. Participants predominately defined notions such as romance and love first, with media examples following to elucidate or support their given explanations. As such, interviewees themselves defined sources of exposure through their own definitions and examples ranging from movie examples to television shows, books, and general references to magazines, while discussing cultural scripts of romance and love. In this manuscript, we broadly refer to their allusions as “media representations” (see Table 2 for types of media references).

Table 2.

Types of media referenced.

Type of media^a	Percentage of references
General media references	40
Media	21
Movies	8
Combination (movies, TV, books, soap operas, magazines)	11
Princess and specific references	60
Disney	13
Princess culture/princesses	13
Princess culture + media	7
Princess culture + Disney movies	7
Aladdin (movie and character’s name)	7
Cinderella (movie and character’s name)	9
Twilight	3
Up	1
Total	100

^aIn vivo counts (e.g., “Media” represents when participants used only the word “media” in a description; “Combination” represents when they reference two or more of the listed sources. “Disney” represents when they specifically said “Disney,” while specific references are when they cited a specific character or movie.).

Analysis

All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Analysis began with chunked coding based on themes inductively derived from focus groups, such as love, romance, femininity, and marriage (Berg, 2009). We next performed line-by-line coding to develop specific themes within romance and love (Charmaz, 2006). In the third round of analysis, we used constant comparison between data and literature to help ground the findings within prior research and develop themes’ theoretical significance (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Topics organically gained importance through interviews and analysis, including the ways in which women distanced from or selectively embraced portrayals of romantic love in the media and their own understandings of love. We came to see that, rather than strictly framed by a princess culture, women’s understandings of romantic relationships were grounded in a discursive logic of the rationalization of love.

Results

Although each participant drew from a rationalized love logic, implying that love is sustainable with time and hard work from both partners (Illouz, 1991), the ways in which they made sense of media portrayals of love and princess culture differed. In interpreting a princess culture, young women appeared to face a conflict between what can be deemed as fantasy (idealist) and reality (rationalist). We found that participants negotiated this conflict through two primary paths: distancing from or selectively embracing princess culture. The vast majority of participants (27) distanced from media representations, defining them as unrealistic, due to their presenting superficial portrayals and creating false and extravagant expectations. Women also expressed tensions in the process of distancing, in that participants explained how they outgrew such idealist views or realized they are much more difficult to obtain than as portrayed, yet at the same time still expressed desires for selective components of idealist love in their relationships. Thus, we find that rather than replacing idealist love, women’s constructions of love consisted of a negotiation between cultural scripts of idealist love through the lens of realist love. Alternatively, three women selectively embraced media according to their interpretations of the portrayals, explicitly drawing from Disney movies to define intimate relational ideals.

Distancing

The majority of women distanced from media representations of romantic love, defining these depictions as idealistic romantic fantasies while contrasting them from realistic love. They explained how these formulas of romantic fantasies could become expectations—expectations they claimed to have outgrown, even while explaining that other women may continue using such expectations to judge achievable love. They argued that media portrayals created false expectations due to over-the-top, extravagant portrayals and over-simplified, superficial portrayals. In these ways, they explained false expectations as based in extremes, claiming media portrayals will lead women to expect too much from others or too little in relation to signals of love.

Distancing from consumption

Women at times distanced themselves from media representations due to their associations with consumption. Rather than upholding concern for commercialism (Orenstein, 2013), women distanced from hyper-consumption by utilizing a discursive logic of rationalized love. Olivia negotiated tensions based in contrasts between simplified media portrayals and lived experiences, separating love from commodities:

In the media it makes you seem like, oh well, he took her out on a date, he bought her flowers, so he’s in love with her. Or, he’s talking to you so he must be in love with you. When in reality it’s not like that. Just because someone’s talking to you doesn’t mean that they even like you. It could just mean that they’re trying to be nice and they’re tolerating you.

When describing over-simplification, participants upheld rationalized senses of delayed gratification (Illouz, 1997), so that explanations of the superficial nature of media storylines also helped uphold the realistic and contractual definition of love requiring time. Sara also explained that:

It is always the cheesy “guy meets girl” and they start by someone messing up, usually the guy, and the girl is all standoff-ish and the guy does some huge romantic thing at the end like a flash mob…And the girl is just like “everything is okay now” and everything seems so simple. There is always some kind of huge conflict and then a huge resolution; then you just have them living happily ever after.…So, I feel like it is very superficial, but how can you depict love in 2 hours? I mean it can take years—it could take months—to fall in love with somebody and you only have a 2 hour thing [so] there’s no way of showing it.

While describing over-simplification in media, such stories remained framed by rationalized love according to the script of individuals as being in charge of love, as also described by Adelie:

in the media it [partnering] is portrayed as an end-all be-all to all of your problems; like if you get married or find a boyfriend or something it means that everything else that was bothering you beforehand will be better because you have a partner. But, of course it’s not true because just having another person there—it could help some things, but just them being your boyfriend—it doesn’t mean that all of your problems in the world will go away. So, I just think that they overemphasize love and romance a bit too much, and not in a healthy way.

Heather, expanding on Adelie’s discussion, separated from hyper-consumption while perpetuating a romantic ethic—treating love as a project to be worked on (Illouz, 1991)—by explaining how one must overcome problems and come to a point of self-realization:

I think that they [media] just link everything together and call “obsession” and “romance” as what love is. I mean, that’s what they are selling is that love can only be acquired from something, or something else, or from someone else instead of realizing the love within yourself. I feel like we just put a dollar sign on it in that way. By saying that you don’t have it [love] already and so you have to get it from elsewhere, so that when people identify love with things and other people and so it’s sad.

Accordingly, women described how basing solutions to broader life problems in relationships are not only unrealistic, but also potentially unhealthy.

Contrasting extravagance with imperfections

Women additionally explicitly distanced from princess and romantic cultural scripts, defining them as extravagant and over-the-top, contrasting them with imperfections of the real world. For example, Stephanie used rationalized love to account for her distancing from images she now defined as idealistic, even while she explained that “other” women may continue being harmed by them:

romance is depicted much more extravagant than what real life is. I think it gives high expectations that lead to a lot of disappointment.…at least for the most part in my life, a lot of what I have seen in movies and shows and on TV or in magazines lead to a lot of disappointment.…up until now in a relationship, I have probably been disappointed when I had high expectations of romance that no guy had yet to fulfill.…I think women are just going to be disappointed over and over again, especially if they see a man who is very simple and doesn’t show very extravagant things.

Similar to Stephanie, Alexandria exemplified the concern women showed for “other” women that may continue being harmed by them while describing unrealistic portrayals. She described how,

…movies and TV really push that [romance]. You should be romantic and you should do all these crazy things and, I don’t know, run in the rain together. Or go skydiving together and I don’t think that’s realistic.…books also make depictions of love unrealistic. Like that whole Twilight thing—that’s unrealistic. I think maybe sometimes movies will show women that wait around for a guy. And I think a lot of women think they can change somebody. Through my own experience, I’ve come to realize that’s not true. You can’t change someone—they have to change for themselves.

In these ways, women did not exclusively define media portrayals of romantic relationships as restricted to princess narratives, although they consistently described growing out of expectations for unrealistic romantic relationships. Aligning with emerging adulthood, participants also encompassed contemporary ideologies that one cannot change others, but they compulsorily must grow into their own selves (Giddens, 1991; Harris, 2004; Illouz, 1997). Samantha relatedly supported rationalist love by defining the reality of imperfection and necessity of compromise:

it’s all about love. I know, especially with the princess movies. It’s geared towards girls because the guys don’t watch princess movies.…All of them have these love scenes and fairytale endings cause it’s definitely, is portraying this raw expectation for the men in life. And then a lot of women get disappointed. Then they think it’s them when it’s not. It’s just, its life. I mean guys aren’t going to be that perfect guy. Like maybe it’s your perfect guy but they won’t be the perfect guy and check off. [laughter]

I: Prince Charming…

Samantha: Exactly. Everybody has their flaws. So set in line to work with them and see what’s dealable [sic] for you and for him.

Participants distanced from idealistic fairytale endings by classifying them as outside the realm of rationalized love because love cannot be instantaneous; alternatively, they explained love through the frame of the everyday—and everyday life as work (Illouz, 1997). Just as Samantha upheld that “others” may be disappointed by these films, Melissa contrasted media portrayals from realistic love by explaining how movies are a nice escape, yet must be understood as fantasies:

I think they mess up our idea of what romance and love are. That you loved someone once, then…you are in love with them for the rest of your life.…It’s not exactly what it is. Because like you know in the movies, it’s all perfect. Even though with Cinderella, she had a little rough time. But it’s a happy ending. But I don’t think that in life it’s always like that unless you work for that so I think it kinda messes up with perceptions.…you know you love the person but you are not the princess you were exposed to when you were younger or whenever it may be. That’s the messed up part of the perception of it.

By classifying idealist love ideals as a part of their early socialization that contributed to building what they now define as unrealistic expectations, which “mess up” their understandings of real (realist) love, participants in turn privileged realist love.

As a part of distancing from media portrayals, women utilized a romantic ethic script, in that one must work to create and uphold love. No individual or relationship can be understood as “perfect,” so in turn the solution—or reality—is that relationships of the everyday require work (Illouz, 1997). As demonstrated by Gloria,

I still kind of had the idea that your life is not complete without a soul²—without a one true love, but I definitely outgrew that idea because the idea that there’s one person out there who can make you insanely happy—that is actually really messed up.

Participants explained how they “came to realize” these images as unrealistic, suggesting women made sense of idealist love as scripts they were exposed to in their youth, intermixing late capitalistic rationality with a maturation process. In doing so, participants “othered” women who they defined as continuing to draw from these unrealistic and immature expectations, perpetuating associations between rationality and maturity (e.g., Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock, 1996). Participants therefore resisted cultural scripts of perfection by drawing from rationalized love. They reinterpreted these media portrayals as unrealistic due to common sense deriving from lived experiences, which did not uphold idealist portrayals (Illouz, 1997). These reinterpretations perpetuated rationalized scripts that responsibility rests with both partners to develop themselves while laboring together to advance the relationship.

Tensions

Women also expressed tensions in distancing through their struggles with desires to experience aspects of media portrayals, even while explaining how they had come to define them as unrealistic fantasies or understand certain aspects as more difficult to achieve than they originally thought. Stories highlighting the tensions faced through distancing particularly highlighted contradictions between princess narratives and idealist love as immature; women expressed “growing out of” believing in idealistic, fantasy portrayals and connected rationalist love with maturity. Such negotiations of tensions helped women to distance from media depictions in ways that expressed their maturity. Even so, these discussions revealed the significance of princess cultural scripts, as these participants explained how they used these traits as cues and how others may continue taking these as cues for what to look for in real life. For instance, Melissa considered that:

You’d like to have a perfect marriage. Your husband is the prince and you are the princess. But I think realistically no. Because it’s more important that my husband just treats me right. Not necessarily have to [sic] treat me like a princess.…as long as you love each other and respect each other and you trust each other and he makes me laugh. To me that means more than whether he treats me like I’m Cinderella…as I grow older, the realistic side of it comes out more which is probably a good thing.

Expanding on prior findings on the influence of Disney (Martin and Kazyak, 2009; Stone, 1975), women explained the appeal of perfection exemplified by the icon of a prince for one’s husband, while drawing from a rationalist love of respect and trust to distance from perfection. Catherine explained:

it is not necessarily that I’m saying I don’t want to find my Prince Charming or whatever, but it is not reality. I feel like when a person’s definition of a Prince Charming is someone that is perfect in every way and stuff like that—and that is not reality. No one is perfect and I just feel like some people who probably subscribe to that, when something doesn’t go the way they perceive it to go, as far as that fairy tale life, it kind of disturbs them.…Yes, I do want that—who wouldn’t want that fairy tale life with butterflies and whatever? But you gotta be realistic about things.

Continuing to support issues of false expectations by the media (Piorkowski, 2008), women made sense of princess culture through contrasting realistic expressions of love with the perfection of romantic fantasies. Women thus faced tensions; their stories described how their experiences did not match with media portrayals even while they expressed ongoing desires to experience such fantasies. Women expressing these ambiguities additionally upheld concern about others who may face “disturbances” in upholding unrealistic ideals, reflecting continued significance of such images even while othering by associating these images with immature traits of idealized cultural scripts.

Multiple women discussed the importance of divorce and adults’ relationships to their own perceptions of love, marriage, and idealistic portrayals. They used these as examples of their lived experiences that helped to explain how they grew into understanding the realities of love versus media portrayals as reference points. For example, Anya described how,

My parents got divorced when I was an early age so I didn’t get to see my parents together. I looked to other sources to figure out what that is to me.

I: What types of things did you look at? Anya: I watched a lot of TV growing up. So, I learned a lot from TV and just noticing my mom’s friends. And different parents—I started babysitting at an early age. I watched the parents of the children that I was babysitting, and how they interacted with each other.…I read a lot and stuff like that. I know it’s not realistic now, which is kinda sad.

Anya accounted for her incorporation of what she now defined as romantic fantasies into her definition of romantic love, rather than her parents’ relationship, explaining this as leading to a renegotiation of love as she grew older and gained experiences. She stated that, even while she no longer defined it as realistic, she would “want a guy to go after me. I want big flowers and stuff like that.” Shojo also discussed how she turned to the princesses after the “mess” of her parents’ divorce because they were a reminder of,

childhood, and that innocence—that life was just perfect and there’s always a happy ending.…They [Disney princesses] cry, they suffer, things happen to them, but they still come out okay.…would I like my parents to be together? Yeah, sure. But, it’s taught me a lot about relationships…and the things that can go wrong.…they never really show you what happens after the marriage in the Disney movies.…With the divorce rate still high, marriage is not this [easy]…You have to really work to keep the happily ever after, don’t you? You really do. It took the longest to get that you don’t just get married and are happy forever. This is an ongoing process. I would love it if Disney had some kind of, not a divorce, I would not be able to watch that, but some kind of marriage/relationship problem.

While media portrayals and her parents’ outward relationship at first corresponded to uphold an idealized construction of love, she accounted for the divorce as disrupting this and leading to a need to actively negotiate new expectations. Although not specifically in reference to divorce, Tia also described a realization that “ever after” was harder than it appeared in princess culture that mirrored Shojo’s discussions of realizing how much harder it is to uphold vows, suggesting the need for a romantic ethic to maintain a romantic relationship:

I think it’s realistic but it’s a lot harder than it looks—very much harder than it looks. To be faithful, to be honorable, to uphold all the vows that you promised to make.…You know, there’s temptations [sic] everywhere. So yeah, it’s definitely a lot harder than princess culture makes it out to be.

Lisa similarly explained how portrayals cannot be used as realistic examples and upheld movies as creating false expectations, while similarly still grappling with defining love as “one of the good things.” She began by summarizing movie plots, in that,

Lisa: the guy likes you and…finally ask[s] her out and that’s romance and then ten years later they are still in love, and that’s love. How many movies have you seen like that? I mean there are a lot of movies like that—forget Disney—every chick-flick, the guy ends with the girl.

I: But what is the effect? Is the effect positive or negative? Lisa: It depends on some people. I think that for very sensitive people it’s a negative effect, but if it’s for someone who is kind of independent, it’s definitely a positive effect, because it is something to look for. Not necessarily look forward to, because nothing is guaranteed in life, but…Love is one of the good things to keep people together.…it’s negative because if…the girl will expect a guy to come to her and will expect the guy to do all of these things and if she doesn’t meet those expectations she won’t be happy even if that guy is meant for her. I think it’s positive because…you’ll think something is out there.

Expressing desires for a happily ever after, participants still emphasized traits as those of realist love including work, caring, and compromise that helped to develop and realize love. These women contrasted from what they defined as perfection found in media portrayals, even while expressing desires for idealist traits that require work to situate with practical and socially constructed as “sustainable” versions of real love.

Through such tensions, women discussed their realization of the difficulties in bringing media representations to life, along with disconnect between such representations and their lived experiences. Each expressed a form of hesitancy in abandoning the idealist love they looked to as a resource growing up. The women often later revisited this consumption of media as a resource although those negotiating their parents’ divorce discussed ways in which these experiences caused them to draw from popular representations to a greater extent. Such descriptions were also arguably revealing in what they left out, such as lust and other forms of sexuality; in fact, such traits may be placed with romantic fantasies that although appealing are only “romantic” and a sign that it may not be real love. Adaptations of rationalized love frameworks can be understood as a more marked, ongoing process.

Rather than an impassioned love that may sweep people off their feet, such as idealistic images that trace back to a “love at first sight” narrative, participants interpreted romantic cultural scripts as extravagant and excessive regarding the actions that men (partners) should take. They then distanced from these depictions by contrasting them with what they defined as achievable and healthy relationships. Overall, distancing occurred as participants’ defined media portrayals as incompatible with rationalized love; they thus adopted this frame to distance from such idealist and unrealistic representations.

Selectively embracing

Alternatively, those who selectively embraced media representations created commonalities between the scripts, combining the scripts of princess culture, or Disney more specifically, and rationalized love. While the minority, three women explicitly drew from media representations to express expectations and desires for love, upholding certain portrayals as useful resources for identifying and developing a realistic love. The three women upheld similar traits of common sense, romantic ethic, and delayed gratification, yet did so through interpreting specific examples from Disney movies. Each of these women emphasized rationalist love and interpersonal investments through specifically referencing a movie—and consistently Aladdin—to selectively offer the ways Disney portrayed real love. Amelia described how:

It’s like Aladdin—all he did was stay on the carpet and slither around. He was poor…He had no food…He took her [Jasmine] to a hole that he lived in to show her the view.…I don’t think that guys realize that it’s like the little things that girls notice. Not the big, grand gestures. I feel like guys now just don’t understand. They should watch that instead of watching whatever they watch.

Rather than defining Disney films as a commodity, Amelia drew from a romantic ethic to highlight Aladdin’s poverty and the “little things,” separating from hyper-consumption and “grand gestures.” In so doing, Amelia upheld love as a part of the everyday, separating from grand gestures that exist outside of the realm of common sense (Illouz, 1997). At the same time, she also upheld a romantic ethic when drawing from her parents’ relationship, explaining how:

they definitely have a lot of problems and everything.…But at the end of the day, they still love each other no matter what. Also they better each other. And also they know how to compromise. And they work hard and they force each other to be better people.

Similarly, while explaining how romance and love were important to her future marriage choice, Diana framed an example from Aladdin through rationalized love, explaining how Disney films teach love as developing through friendship:

“Romance, [and] love, [are] very important”. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from the Disney movies it’s that most of them—not all of them—but more like the recent ones, the ones in the ‘90’s like Aladdin, weren’t really love interests at first, but more…like a friendship. I feel like friendship is super necessary before going into the love and going into the romance.

Diana selectively embraced various traits of princess narratives, while suggesting some of the appeal comes from Disney as a part of her “childhood bubble.” While she explained princesses as a resource, in that they are examples of taking advantage of opportunities, she created parallels between the princesses and her family’s choices to better their lives. Janice’s description also embraced aspects of Aladdin, utilizing a rationalized framework of compromise that she defined as a component of realistic love:

I look at them [Disney movies] and there’s this concept that love is simple, but the Disney movies show you that it’s not necessarily.…Because she meets Aladdin and she’s like, “How dare you act like I’m a trophy? I’m not.” And she’s angry with him but he realizes he has to make up for it and…it’s the compromise that’s actually in it. You know that these characters are in love. It’s just the truth of those movies.

While Janice’s stories expressed her connection to a princess culture, as she watched them “ad nauseam” as a child, she accounted for these connections as helping her bond with her family of Cuban origin through the bridge of Spanish and English versions. She also interpreted these movies through the lens of her family teaching her that “being smart was important,” allowing her to distance from a princess culture as defined by “prettiness.” Diana and Janice’s stories, in discussing friendship and compromise, helped to uphold a defining feature of rationalized love, as related to delayed gratification and active development over time (Illouz, 1997). Therefore, although romantic fantasies entered into descriptions, these women discursively made sense of media representations through rationalized love discourses. Participants defined how a realistic love can be achieved based in friendship, caring, and separation from consumption or “grand gestures.” While selectively embracing, these stories still upheld the trait of love as something that can be controlled, and thus based in a romantic ethic of individualized responsibility (Duggan, 2003; Giddens, 1991; Harris, 2004; Illouz, 1997).

Unique to this group of women was their reference to specific movies and examples, suggesting a selection process in which participants filtered out other components that did not as strongly connect to their overarching constructions of love to find the “truth” in these movies (e.g., Radway, 1984). Additionally, as these participants discursively explained how these movies revealed the “realities” of love, they did not have the same dissonance as women who distanced from media portrayals. Such embracing of movie examples prevented their need to account for how they “grew into” rationalized understandings of love. Thus, as a form of negotiation, selectively embracing traits of princess narratives as realistic allowed women to discuss a romantic ethic without the need to contrast from passionate, idealist love in this particular context of romantic love.

Discussion

Through interviews with 30 college-aged women, we argue the discursive logic of a “romantic ethic,” deriving from the “practical rationalization of romantic love” (Illouz, 1991, p. 246), informs young women’s interpretations of a self-defined princess culture. This romantic ethic distinguishes love from emotions through a rationalized lens, treating love as a project to be worked on by means of a “utilitarian and therapeutic” framing (Illouz, 1991, p. 245). We argue that women’s selective accounting for how they developed understandings of the “realities” of romantic relationships reveals tensions in concurrently hegemonic conceptions of love: idealist, or fantastical and emotional love, and realist, rational and practical love viewed as sustaining long-term relationships. Therefore, rather than realist love replacing idealist love, we find that both conceptualizations remain prevalent and influential in constructions of love—even while these conceptualizations can appear contradictory. Such findings contribute to understandings of how collegiate women discursively make sense of romantic relationships, as we find young women distance from and selectively embrace princess culture when negotiating popular cultural romantic scripts. They do so in ways predominately associating idealist love with youth and realist love with maturity, reflecting an ongoing sociocultural privileging of realist love. We conclude by considering interconnections between late capitalistic ideologies and maturation, alongside complexities in the case of infantilizing a princess culture and separations from hyper-consumption.

The participants’ distancing from and selectively embracing elements of princess culture supports prior research that such cultural scripts provide a framework for behaviors of social groups and constructions of gender identity (Fearon and Laitin, 2000). We found that in distancing, young women resisted cultural scripts of perfection (romance) by drawing from the script of rationalized love, enabling them to reinterpret these media representations. For those who expressed tensions, they appeared to be in the process of defining media representations as idealistic and thus more difficult or unrealistic to achieve in real life; however, while some explicitly expressed how they are unrealistic, they still appeared hesitant to fully distance from these representations. Alternatively, those who selectively embraced created connections and continuity between the scripts of rationalized love and media representations of love and romance.

Complexities arise in that participants’ discussions can arguably infantilize traits of a princess culture, defining the desires for “butterflies” and “happy endings” deriving from popular cultural scripts as the dreams of childhood that they now realize are too unrealistic to be upheld as one matures. These findings suggest that women must exert energy to overcome what can be understood as a form of dissonance; while they are socialized to understand romantic love idealistically, they must “grow into” the realities of love that are more compatible with late capitalism. Additionally, although there may be important traits to distance from in relation to princess cultural scripts (e.g., Swart and Sayago, 2014), these findings suggest that the othering of women who uphold infantilized traits of the princess culture can, in a form of defensive othering, help to uphold these feminized traits as lesser than traits of historically masculinized rationality.

Additionally, women who distance from portrayals may experience more difficult transitions than those selectively embracing. As women are creating replacement selves in the process of distancing, they may face increased challenges in maintaining a coherent sense of self in the process of accounting for past “immature” selves. Thus, we may also understand the interview setting as a place for identity talk, which helps to reveal how these young women are not only defining romantic relationships, but how they are constructing themselves as rational people. As expressed by Opsal (2011, p. 138), verbal identity talk allows individuals the chance “to create vivid versions of their personal identities by challenging existing identities or constructing new ones.” We can therefore understand constructions of love as interwoven into the construction of self, constituted through narrative accounts that can include past experiences as a means to evoke their present and desired selves (Opsal, 2011).

Our findings also suggest additional research is needed to better understand turning points affecting emerging adult college-aged women’s usage of cultural scripts when constructing definitions of romantic love, including how they account for influences of lived experiences, multiple media portrayals, and other intimate relationships. Similarities across women’s narratives suggest positive nostalgia associated with princess narratives, arguably at times as a form of escapism from negative events, or a strong distancing from princess narratives when they are perceived as the cause of negative events. Young women’s stories suggest that parental divorce, when experienced in a potentially more traumatic manner or at earlier ages, may lead to increased reliance on princess narratives as models of romantic love.

Future research can therefore further explore the critical turning points that contribute to women coming to adopt a rationalized love script. For instance, events that are perceived as traumatic, as in the case of Tonya, may be an obstacle to women more holistically adopting a rationalized love perspective yet may support the development of a princess identity. Tonya consistently looked down or away, quickly shifting topics following a description of her parents’ divorce. She went on to explain how she had not “really cared all that much,” yet then like other participants, drew from a movie—in this case Up—to selectively describe what she wanted from a romantic relationship. As Cerulo (1997, p. 388) argues that cultural scripts can create an “armor of gender stereotypes,” it may be helpful to consider Tonya’s experiences a form of “armor” that is used by women to negotiate the difficulties they have experienced from perceived let downs deriving from false expectations—or potentially to protect themselves as they work through challenges experienced based in their parents’ divorces. These extensions can help to clarify when women draw from princess narratives as escape from troubles or perceive princess narratives as the originator of troubles.

This research emphasizes the need to continue challenging heteronormative ideals of romantic love in the media through the use of education, socialization, and practice in an effort to expand the possibilities for how love can be healthily realized. This research also demonstrates how emotions such as romantic love are socially constructed within particular contexts and remain gendered (Turner and Stets, 2005). Research can thus additionally be expanded for comparisons across geographical locations, to understand if there are regional effects on constructions of love. Arguably, without alternatives, women will continue needing to exert additional emotional energy to overcoming false expectations or under-informed images for life planning, considering the interconnections between constructions of love and self. By understanding how romantic relationships are socially constructed, we can better understand social influences affecting supportive development of self-love and romantic relationships.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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