When he slapped me for the very first time, I was shocked or more appropriately – in trauma. I cried all day. It was our love marriage. He was tall, dark and handsome similar to what I used to read in my “Digest Stories”. When I saw him for the very first time, I was sure that I found my Prince charming. I remember him telling me he loved me after a few weeks, he told me how wonderful and amazing I was. He used to pick me up in his car and drive me anywhere I wanted; if I called he’d always answer like he was so happy to talk to me. I thought I had met the man of my dreams; he seemed perfect and soon we got married.
But it all changed after his first slap and many more thereafter. I found it hard to focus, hard to go out, hard to pray or even have faith. My heart was bleeding and the abuse was getting worse day by day …….I was one of those girls who loved to live in a world of fantasy and loved to dream about this world as a fairytale story. I had grown up reading “Digest Stories”. The love, the magic and the charm which I used to feel and read in those stories was phenomenal and hell yes, I wanted to live the life of those characters, so to deal with such a “disastrous reality” was hard for me.
Digest stories have blown our expectations of love completely out of reality and this can be dangerous for teenagers. Digest stories make us believe in love at first sight. There is absolutely no way you can simply look at someone and instantly fall in love with them. There is attraction, which can make you want to get to know the person, but you cannot fall in a true kind of love solely based on looks. In my opinion, Digest Stories make women believe their key to happiness is a man. Many women wait around for a man to come sweep them off their feet and make their life wonderful.
Women find themselves depending on men their entire lives instead of trying to be independent mentally and economically and in charge of their own happiness. When these women are not able to find a “Prince Charming”, it can lead to depression because their lives are not like the perfect love stories detailed in digest magazines. Ever since they were little girls, these girls dreamed of falling in love and then when they grow up and have yet to find someone, it can cause acute depression. This depression can last a long time because many people start feeling insecure.
Most of the Digest stories though, end with “Happily Ever after”, but in reality life offers much more than this. This can be a factor for the high divorce rate in society today with “nearly half of first marriages in Pakistan ending in divorce. People who get divorced eventually realize that they are not truly happy and have not found “the one” that fairy tales have insisted they search for.Fairy tales and Digest Stories have instilled such high expectations of love that could not possibly ever be met, but some people still believe that they can be.
