He Will Never Be Your Happily Ever After: On Loving the Imperfect Mortal Man
October 23, 2026
The Fantasy We Walk Into
Real love has a chance when you understand that he will never be your happily ever after.
Most women are raised in a world of Disney fairy tales, but we were not given the true lessons behind those stories. So we walk into relationships carrying an expectation that the man standing in front of us will finally give us the safety and the unconditional love that we wish our fathers and mothers had.
When the man in front of you, inevitably, shows you that he is an imperfect mortal man who makes mistakes, your inner little girl, who just wants to be protected, gets scared.
She wants him to be Prince Charming. She wants to feel forever protected and forever cherished. She wants him to be the one who finally makes up for everything that was missing in childhood.
But he will never be Prince Charming.
Prefer to listen? Hear me talk through this transmission on Episode 22 of the podcast.
Just like you and me, he carries his own conditioning, his own masks, his own intergenerational wounds, and society's expectations of what it means to be a man.
And a woman, who has not been initiated into womanhood will forever follow her inner little girl's longing. She will bypas red flags. She will ignore the wisdom of her body. She will hold onto potential, hoping that he will turn into the savior she always wanted. She abandons herself again and again, just for the promise of love.
Where Giving Up Our Needs Began
Self-abandonment doesn't start with a boyfriend. It starts as a survival strategy created in childhood, when connection meant survival.
For some, little girls learns very quickly that giving up their own needs is the fastest way to stay safe, keep the peace, and feel loved.
For me, it started when I was two and a half, when my sweet little brother was born very prematurely. At that age, I learned: I have to give up my own needs for a boy or he might die.
Then my second brother came along, and the lesson repeated: I have to give up my needs for my brothers.
Later, when my mum got sick, and my dad was under immense stress, the pattern was reinforced itself again: I have to give up my needs to make life easy on Dad.
It happened again in my teens and again in my twenties with boyfriends. Over and over and over.
We all have patterns we repeat unconsciously from a belief and behaviour we developed as little kid.
I believed that making things easier on my parents and putting the needs of men first was what made me lovable.
I remember sitting in a boyfriend's car about a week into our relationship. He completely lost it on me. He was furious and controlling because a male classmate of mine was being a kind, supportive friend.
I froze. I was scared as I watched him get really angry. But instead of leaving the car, I did what my nervous system had started doing when I was a little girl.
I went straight into people pleasing.
I spent the next eighteen months paying for the choice I made in that moment.
He showed me who he was in that car, long before I moved in with him. And I ignored it. All because, I'd spent my whole life learning that making things easier for men was safer than listening to myself.
Maybe you know this pattern too.
Maybe there have been moments when your body knew before your mind was ready to admit it. Moments when you felt the tightening in your chest, the knot in your stomach, the small voice inside you asking you to pay attention, but you explained it away because you wanted the relationship to work.
So how do we change this dynamic in ourselves?
Devotion and Discipline
We cultivate discernment. And discernment is born from two practices: devotion and discipline.
Devotion is reverence for your heart, your womb, your emotions, and the little girl inside of you.
It is the practice of becoming the steady adult she needed. The woman who can sit with her feelings with tenderness, listen to what her body is telling her, and stop abandoning herself in order to be chosen.
Society often teaches women that our emotional depth is a problem to be managed. But your feelings are not a problem. They are part of the landscape of your inner life.
Real devotion means learning how to stay with them.
It means letting grief be grief, letting anger show you where something matters, and letting your longing be spoken instead of hidden away until it starts making choices for you.
Devotion asks: What is true for me right now? What does my body know? What does the little girl inside of me need from the adult woman I am becoming?
Discipline is mindfulness.
Mindfulness requires strength of focus. Where you choose what you think about. Where you catch yourself in the act of ignoring your body. Where you have your mind work for you instead of it running the show.
It is the daily practice of staying rooted in yourself so you do not abandon your own instincts.
When devotion and discipline meet, they give birth to discernment.
You step into being the initiated woman who carries clear sight.
You stop asking a mortal man to carry the weight of being your Prince Charming. You look at him with clear eyes, and you ask honest questions.
Can this man meet me? Can I meet him? Is there real-world evidence that he is trustworthy and trying his best? Does he have a solid community of men around him? How does he receive my emotions and my truth? Am I seeing who he actually is, or am I falling in love with his potential?
When a woman holds discernment, she is no longer buying into fantasy. Discernment gives you the backbone and the open heart to choose men who are right for you into your life.
This is where your survival strategies become your gifts.
Letting Real Love Begin
I want to be crystal clear. Unethical, abusive, or harmful behaviour is never acceptable.
And, at the exact same time, expecting an imperfect mortal man to meet you one hundred percent of the time is delusional. It places an impossible weight on his shoulders.
He is going to make mistakes. He will drop the ball.
But if you are walking in discernment with a man of integrity, his human missteps do not mean your heart has to slam shut. It does not mean you have to keep a secret mental score of every time he has let you down.
You hold your boundaries. You speak with honesty. You receive his offerings. You recognize that you are two imperfect mortals learning how to love one another in this wild and crazy world.
When you can let go of the fantasy of a happily ever after, this is where real, sacred, grounded love finally gets to take root.
Stepping Into Sanctuary
If you are ready to stop abandoning yourself in love, trust your discernment, and learn how to welcome an imperfect mortal man without losing yourself in him, this is the journey we take inside Sanctuary.
Sanctuary is my six-month group immersion for women walking the path from heartbreak to devotion.