Mr. Right doesn’t exist – but we’re still looking

Rhett Butler. Mr. Darcy. Edward Cullen. These are the romantic heroes of love from Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind" and Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight" series.

These are the men that women grow up breathlessly reading and watching movies about. These are the men that we dream about after closing a book or leaving the theater and then silently think, "I'm going to find a man just like that."

These are the white knights and lusty heroes of film and literature that set the bar high for love and romance, passion and sex–and every other male on the planet. And then, these are the guys who really screw us up.

It's a disheartening moment for a girl when she is awakened from her misty fairytale dream of what she thinks men are like to the hard reality of how guys actually are. There finally comes a time when every woman realizes she is not going to meet Prince Charming because he isn't real. She's not going to find Mr. Right because he doesn't exist.

From the time we're little girls, we are fed the delicious idea that men in books and movies are real, that somehow we'll find someone just like them. Sometimes these perfectly written men are all we have to base our assumptions on.

We don't realize as girls that in the real world there is no way Mr. Darcy would have married Elizabeth Bennet without making her sign a pre-nup or that Rhett Butler would most likely not marry a woman bogged down with two children from previous marriages. And yet, we hold out hope.

I think it takes a few falls from the cushy pillows of their lovers' bed for women to finally understand that it's unrealistic and also unfair to hold men to the standards of those found in romance novels.

At the risk of sounding jaded, the holy trinity of handsome, virtuous and charming doesn't really exist in any one man. In our heart of hearts, we know that there is no perfect man, but we continue to search for him at the dance clubs and perched atop bar stools. Each time the relationship falls apart, like the tear-soaked tissues in our hands, we are let down again.

What's worse is that we can't always blame it on the man – he has no idea that we're expecting him to meet unrealistic standards. We're asking men to fight nature and jump off the pages of our fairytale books to the real world. In the mean time, women pass over and ignore the great real men in our lives because they don't look like James Bond or make Donald Trump's money.

How many times has the modern woman missed out on a chance at love because she was searching for a mythical man?

This doesn't mean that we should stop following our dreams or settle for men who make us unhappy, are abusive or cheat on us. It means that we find someone who is good, honest, hard working and loves genuinely.

It doesn't mean settling for someone we can barely deal with because of the fear of being single forever. It means finding a happy medium between the fairytale happily ever after and what is real.

Still, in the end, I guess boys really are better in books.

 
Vanessa Juarez may be reached at prospector@utep.edu.