Once upon a time last year, a village matchmaker happened upon a princess from the Land of LaLa. The princess was single, but open to dating and the matchmaker said, “Come to my office for the initial interview. We shall find you a prince.”

The princess went to see the matchmaker. A paper-thin computer was perched on the streamlined desk. On a black screen, the gold letters of the price menu read:

$100 The dating pool database.  
$1700 Two dates with two different princes. 
$20,000 The worldwide search for the prince of your dreams. 

The princess was perplexed. 

“What does it mean to be in the dating pool database?”

“We enter your information. If I determine another prince, who didn’t precisely work out with another princess, is suited for you, I will contact you and set you up on a date. With the other options, you will be custom-matched with a prince directly, no recycling.”

“I don’t want to be floating in a dating pool.”

“Tell me, why are you here? Why have you come to the village matchmaker?”

“I’d like to meet someone I can open my heart to and share my life with.”

“And is marriage important to you?”

“Um, it’s not...”

“WRONG answer! You ARE looking for marriage. If you’re with a man who does not want marriage, he’s the wrong man. We only deal with committed relationships here, ones that WILL lead to marriage. Do you still wish to continue?”

The princess squirmed. She very much wanted a match. 

“I choose the $100 Option.”

“Consider the other options. We do have payment plans.”

“And I DO have bills to pay.”

The matchmaker slid into her chair and flipped her skinny computer open. The interview went somewhat as follows. 

Favorite male celebrity? Pause. The princess went completely blank. Couldn’t think of one. They had all vanished from her memory. The guy from—what’s that movie? She already had failed the first question. Never mind. What’s your idea of the perfect date? Sigh. What important qualities are you looking for in a man? Heart. Commitment to Service. Passion. What do you do? Yawn. What book are you currently reading? Untie the Strong Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Are you an alcoholic? No. There will be background check, standard procedure, anything you’d like to tell me? I’m poor. Any arrests? No. DUI’s? No. Just poor.

What do you wish men knew about women?

The princess took a deep breath. “I wish men knew that when women cry or express deep emotion, they don’t have to fix it. Tears don’t need fixing. They just need strong arms to the hold space for them to fall. The masculine establishes the foundation, the walls, the stage so that the feminine can be safe to dance the emotions of all humanity there in the space he built.”

The matchmaker’s eyes were wide. “That’s good. That’s really good.”

“I know.”

“Final question: who are your 3 favorite Disney princesses?" 

The princess laughed. Then she saw the matchmaker was serious.

“You need not respond now. You can email me your favorites along with 3 photos of yourself and then you’ll be entered in our dating pool database. Good afternoon, Princess.”

That night the princess wrote an email. 

Dear Matchmaker,
This is in response to your princess question. I used to be the old version of Rapunzel-- the one stuck in the tower, sheltered, with an overprotective mother whom I really wanted to please. Now, I am Rapunzel of the Tangled sort because when you’re slaying dragons, the hair gets messy. But I really just want to be a mermaid. I’m Ariel minus the whole curse and losing the voice and giving up my fins for a guy. I’ve played that whole story out several times. I’m not giving up my fins. I want to be Daryl Hannah in Splash. I tell the prince my darkest secret and he loves me still. The ocean is ours.

Most sincerely, Princess 
P.S.- My photos are attached.

The Princess waited for a phone call from the matchmaker. She wondered what would come of it. Would the selection of her favorite princesses provide the psychological profile needed for the database to select the perfect prince for her? After hours of analyzing archetypes and personality, the princess dialed up her friend, the psychologist, to ask her, in her expert opinion, what the meaning of it all was. 

“They’ll ask the guy who his favorite Disney princesses are and match him with the woman who chose the same ones.”

Was this all? The Princess was disheartened indeed. 

She opened her window and cried out into the night, “Hey rich Princes, you feel like slumming it with a poor girl? Hey Matchmaker, Matchmaker! Get me a MATCH!” 
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But the Princess got her own match. She set herself on fire, burned and rose from the ashes as Queen.

In the Land of La La, in a city called Beverly Hills, I was rounding the corner of a tightly packed parking garage when two men in a large white truck coming from the opposite direction waved at me as if they knew me. The driver rolled down his window.

“Hey,” he shouted. “Hey, we’ve got a question.” There was nowhere for my car to go. Hearing his question was inevitable.
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“Why do all the women in Beverly Hills have big lips?”

The man in the passenger side threw his head back and laughed. The driver demanded again, “Why?”

I clenched my teeth and directed my focus on the slab of cement to my right. I slowly rounded it with an inch to spare.

My answer to their inquiry is this: SHUT-UP.

The last thing women need is more judgment heaped upon their bodies. Countless advertisements and magazines and commercials and our parents and siblings and even our supposed “friends” have in subtle and non-subtle ways judged our looks. “You look like a rhino from the back!” “You look like a slut!” “You look like a dyke!” “You look tired. Are those more wrinkles under your eyes?” “Your butt is too big!” “Your butt is not big enough!” “Are you pregnant?” We are bombarded with millions of contradictory messages. Ads tell us that if only we buy this product, we will be perfect. What a fantastic formula: contradiction plus perfection guarantees that no matter what, we are NEVER going to get it right. It only takes one external dig to believe a lie that says we aren’t beautiful and therefore, we aren’t enough. Then the internal shaming begins. What we say to ourselves in the mirror may be far worse than any criticism two guys in a truck could ever hurl.
Do women see through the lies and programming? Of course they do. Women are reclaiming their beauty and self-worth on their terms every single moment. But it is a fight. Understand this. It is a fight for their lives until they are healed and whole.

So, do you want to help women out? Stop shaming them. Stop critiquing. Stop trying to elicit a woman in a car next to you to participate in your judgment of them. I REFUSE. Women with boob jobs, nose jobs, lip injections, I love you. Women with untamed hair, with wrinkled skin, with cellulite, I love you. I love women.
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Do you really want to help? Be the space that supports women as they come into self-love, as they rise into their own beauty, as they remember who they really are, as they reclaim their power, as they restore their bodies to holy temples on sacred ground. Praise the process. Though you may not know it, this is the true beauty you seek, but you shall never claim ownership of it. It is not yours to own. It is yours to behold in awe and in reverence.

Having experienced the forces of dark magic in my life and having walked through darkness many times over, here’s what I know to be true.
 
Dark Magic feeds on

• Confusion, chaos and fear, but most of all FEAR

 
Dark Magic works when

• You believe a lie
• You willingly give your power away. (This is equivalent to believing that you have no power to do anything about the situation, which is the biggest lie of all.)

 
To defeat dark magic

• Grieve what you feel was lost.

• Feel the righteous anger and the full range of emotions that arise.  Especially feel the emotions that you aren’t “strong” enough to feel.  Feeling them is precisely where your strength comes from.
• Reclaim your power. Allow your darkest secrets to surface and share them with those that will hold them in a safe and loving space.  Like massive roots stretching down in the dank soil of Mother Earth, what you have buried deep within you as shame is the foundation for the reclamation of power.  Take it back. 
• Trust yourself. All of YOU. Know that you KNOW. 

 
See dark magic for what it is: ultimately impotent and actually, laughable.  Dark magic is a little shuffling skeleton.  An empty shell, perpetually starving, desperate to syphon the energy of others in order to fill itself.  It thinks that will actually work.  Ha!  Ha!
 
Remember who YOU are first.
 
Then, you can gently whisper, “Remember, little skeleton, remember.”
 
 
 
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