The fairytale of love is simple. Place your still beating heart on a silver platter and offer it to your beloved. To your prince, the man of your dreams. He will cherish you, he will take you away from all your cares to HIS beautiful idyllic castle. Where you will reign as HIS queen and live by his side, day in, day out, for months on end, year after year, happily ever after.

If your knightly prince spurns your advances and refuses your heart, you are then told you can love a beast. A creature of claw and fang, a nightmarish figure that threatens your dreams, but with your love, or so it is insisted, he will be transformed. He will become everything you have ever wanted, everything ever desired. Everything you deserve, but first you must learn to love this beast.

I have done all this. I have offered my first-born child to a grotesque dwarf. Spun straw into gold, locked inside a rat infested dungeon, night after night. All for love. And a kingly fortune. Did I ever wonder if my prince would love me for me alone? The thought never entered my golden head. I merely thought of wondrous dresses, satin slippers on my dainty feet and balls.

I have been rescued from blackened fireplaces by pastel garbed old women, transported to glittering soirees by pumpkin and mice, forced my feet into crystal shoes even as shards of glass cut deep into my flesh. For a man? No, never a simple man but for a prince. A man beyond men, charming and debonair, handsome, naturally, and with kingdoms to rule. Servants to thrash, villages to plunder, people to conquer.

I have been drugged, forced to sleep for hundreds of years only to waken to a man with a fetish for comatose virgins. Forcefully imprisoned by hags with lesbian tendencies, I have allowed men to damage my golden locks enabling them to climb my ivory tower.

I have lived alone in the woods with seven under-developed men. I have been poisoned for my beauty, hated by my father's wife, and kissed awake by a man with a thing for glass coffins.

I have kissed frog after frog, searching for the one to waken my princessly state. I have tossed and turned, spent sleepless nights on mattresses piled high with a single legume hidden in their depths. I have given up mermaid dreams for the agony of flesh.

I have done it all…for a fairytale that refuses to end happily ever after.

And if by chance, your prince did come, with the passing of time you will come to notice that the platter upon which you placed your heart is not pure silver, merely cheaply plated. That it is tarnished and there is a faint crack where once it was broken and clumsily mended. Then you will realise that your heart has now shrivelled. It lies unused and abandoned, lost somewhere amongst the cold stones of that icy castle. Where there is no warmth. Where there is no privacy. Where there is indeed no love, and happy ever after exists only in the minds of the delusional.

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