conditional love
This is the first of seven essays exploring the Conditional Love Wound, the pattern that teaches women to trade themselves for the hope of being chosen.
It begins where so many of us learned the lesson: with a fairytale.
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Every generation has its Prince Eric.
In the 1980s, he danced with you in the rain. In the 1990s, he stammered his way through a bookshop in Notting Hill. In the 2000s, he had Southern charm and needed you to fix him.
Now, he's 6'3, works in finance, and has a trust fund.
The fantasy changes. The projection stays the same.
You grew up watching mermaids trade their voices for legs. Watching women transform themselves—shrink themselves, silence themselves, perform themselves—for the chance to be chosen. You absorbed it like air. The message was clear: love requires transformation. Belonging requires sacrifice. And if you want to be wanted, you must not be yourself.
“This is the Conditional Love Wound.”
And it doesn't start when you meet him. It starts long before, when you learn that love is something you earn, not something you are.
The fairytales told you this in a thousand ways.
The Little Mermaid falls in love with a prince she's seen [only] once, while he was unconscious. She doesn't know him. She knows the *idea* of him. The world he represents. The life she imagines. The escape from a father who doesn't understand her.
But she isn't longing for a man. She's longing for freedom.
“Bet they don't reprimand their daughters.” She Sings
That line does all the heavy lifting. Ariel wants a world where no one controls her. No one reprimands her. No one tells her what she can and cannot do.
She wants options. Individuality. The freedom to stand on her own two feet — not swim, not float, not drift through someone else's expectations, but stand.
But she doesn't have the language for that longing. No one has given it to her. So she looks at the land, looks at Eric, and projects all of it onto him.
He becomes the symbol. The vessel. The answer to the ache she cannot name.
She thinks: “If I can just get to him, I'll be free. If I can just get to that world, I'll finally be allowed to be myself.”
So she builds him in her mind. She replays their one encounter: him unconscious, her saving him, a song she sang that he will never remember and constructs a whole future from it. She fills in what she doesn't know with what she wants to believe.
She sees a man who will let her be wild. A man who will choose her. A man who represents everything her father forbade.
She doesn't see a stranger she's met once while he was unconscious.
She sees escape. Permission. Belonging. Proof that she's worthy of a different life.
And because no one has ever told her: You can have freedom without giving yourself away, she makes the trade.
She trades her voice to the sea witch for legs that feel like walking on knives with every step. She can't speak. She can't tell Prince Eric she saved him. She can't say what she needs or who she is.
And instead, she dances for him through the pain, hoping he'll choose her.
But he doesn't. Not at first.
You learned to dance for others from a young age.
Maybe you saw it in your mother. The way she made herself smaller around your father. The way her desires didn't matter, the way she served and smiled, never asking for what she needed.
Or maybe you learned it from the world. From romcoms like Grease, where Sandy gets a perm and puts on leather pants to win Danny. From How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, where love is literally a performance, a game of manipulation.
In every story, love rewarded transformation. Not of him. Of you. Your essence. Because the romance was performative.
And so you learned that love is projection and performance.
The Little Mermaid primed you for characters like Carrie Bradshaw, the woman who has it all but is still chasing after a man who can't see her.
Carrie has the career. The friends. The clothes. The apartment. She's smart, funny, beautiful. Women who love her surround her — women who see what she cannot see, who tell her he's not worth it, who warn her again and again.
And yet.
She spends years pining for a man who: won't give her a key to his apartment, who introduces her as a "friend" to his mother, who calls in the middle of the night when he's lonely and disappears for weeks when he's not, who moves to Paris without asking her if she wants to come, who tells her he'll never marry again, and then marries someone else.
She sees the red flags. Somewhere, she knows. But she's locked into the fantasy she's built in her head — the story of who he could be, who they could be, the life she's imagined from fragments and half-promises.
Her friend calls him "the Big Mac of men, you know it's bad for you, but you keep going back for more."
But she can't stop.
So when he finally calls her his girlfriend, years into their on-and-off, hot-and-cold, will-they-won't-they, she's elated. She treats it like a victory.
But that should have been the beginning. That should have been the bare minimum. Not something she spent years earning.
She's been so starved for crumbs that basic acknowledgement feels like a feast.
This is the Ariel wound in the real world: a woman with intelligence, beauty, community, opportunity, trading herself piece by piece for a man who never offered what she actually needed.
She wasn't looking for him.
She was looking for freedom. For belonging. For permission to be herself.
But no one ever told her she could have those things without giving herself away to get them
Stay tuned for Part Two: The Faustian Bargain — where we ask what happens when a young woman, unguarded and uninitiated, makes a trade she doesn't understand.
* Images sourced via Pinterest. All rights belong to the original creators.*