5 Awful Lessons Disney Teaches You About Relationships

On one hand, relationships in Disney cartoons are obviously condensed, idealized fantasies that tend to include far more dragons and anthropomorphic mice than you can expect in your own marriage. But on the other hand, these are literally the first fictional relationships that millions of kids are exposed to.

So what's wrong with a four-year-old girl seeing a downtrodden young girl get swept off her feet by a handsome prince, and then watching that same movie 136 more times until Mom and Dad "lose" the DVD? Well it has to do with the lessons those movies have been teaching us for the last 80 years or so. Things like ...

#5. "Any Single Woman Older Than 30 Turns Into A Twisted Monster!"

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If there's an unmarried woman over 30 in the cast of a Disney movie, you can more or less bet that she's the villain -- an evil sorceress, like in Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid, an evil stepmother, like in Cinderella, or both, like in Snow White. Left unmarried and unfulfilled, they spend their free time learning witchcraft and scheming against pretty teenage women; you know, the ones who still have a chance at happiness.

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God, just look at this hideous she-beast, if you can.

In most cases, their evil motivation is jealousy. The Queen in Snow White and Ursula the scheming meroctopus from The Little Mermaid are overwhelmed with rage about being alone and unattractive. Even though the Queen is, according to the magic mirror, the second most attractive woman on Earth, she's still twisted into insanity over only winning silver. In her case, as well as that of the evil witch from Tangled, their bitterness eventually winds up bringing out their true forms, which are of course broken-down, ancient hags. You know, the worst possible thing you can ever be.

Girls, you better put a ring on that finger before you wind up spending your days weeping over a crystal ball in some decrepit castle spire.

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This was a single's bar until the clock struck midnight on her 30th birthday.

In the real world, of course, single people are doing fine. Even though popular opinion mirrors Disney in believing that reaching 30 without getting married reflects failure and will result in a bitter depression, studies show that single adults are generally no less happy than married people, and happier than those divorced or widowed. In fact, autonomy (the ability to do whatever you damn well please, whenever you want) is one of the best indicators of overall life satisfaction. Aging isn't a huge deal either, since we are seeing that people in general get happier as they get older. So really, making it past thirty without a ball and chain allows you to have a super awesome, happy life where you don't have to convince anyone else that popcorn, booze, and frosting counts as dinner.

But of course, the evil old spinster is part of an overall theme here ...

#4. "Young Love Is The Best And Most Pure Bond You Will Ever Have!"

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This sort of thing is so common that you barely even notice it: Every single Disney princess is under 20. That's not surprising, since these are kids' movies, and kids tend to imagine a 35-year-old looking like the hideous crone in Snow White. Cinderella is 19 when she gets married, so she's basically elderly by Disney standards. Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), Ariel, and Mulan are 16. Jasmine is 15. Snow White is goddamn 14. Seriously, it says that at the start of the movie (after the credits, they attend her eighth grade graduation).

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So this scene somehow managed to get creepier!

Of course, a lot of these movies take place sometime in the Middle Ages, when getting married as soon as you hit puberty was routine (since everybody was dead of the plague by 22). But think about the lesson there. How many girls grew up thinking a truly beautiful princess should meet her soul mate while her age still starts with a "1"? How many found out that's a recipe for disaster? Current studies put divorce rates for teenager marriages at around 22 percent higher than marriages of those who waited. Two-thirds of people who marry between 15 and 22 wind up divorcing. The majority of these Disney marriages would be doomed if not for the fact that medieval marriages were probably cold and distant by definition, and filing for divorce would get you burned as a witch.

Obviously, in the real world, people are much happier if they lived and learned a little bit before deciding to tie the knot -- your personality hasn't even fully formed as a teenager. In addition to age, people who are more educated also tend to have more successful marriages than those who dropped out of high school.

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We hope she's been dreaming about math lessons.

But all of that seems like a downer to a little girl who has been taught that a handsome man will swoop in and rescue her from her awful parents/captors. Come on, who is the wicked stepmother supposed to symbolize in these stories? "Don't worry about your shitty home life. If you're beautiful enough, your prince will come along and rescue you from that witch!" Which brings us to ...

#3. "A Whirlwind Romance Fixes All Past Trauma!"

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It's basically a rule in Disney movies that the protagonists either come from broken families or are downright orphans. Snow White's presumably dead dad left her in the care of a stepmother who is literally trying to kill her. Cinderella's family forces her into a life of indentured slavery. Belle and Ariel's childhoods are defined by absentee single fathers. Aurora is forced to live in the woods, and she's 16 before she meets another human being. Anna from Frozen suffers the death of her parents and has to live alone with a sister who refuses to talk to her. And these movies are made for kids.

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"Look, we can build a snowman or build crippling emotional issues. Your choice."

Of course, it always works out fine for the characters when they get married and instantly activate the "happily ever after" clause. Hardly a word is ever said about the crippling, lifelong psychological damage that they're suffering. Simba might be a lion, but watching his dad get shredded by wild animals had to do something terrible to his psyche.

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"Hakuna matata, smile, be normal. Hakuna matata, smile, be normal. Hakuna matata, smile, be normal."

In real life, experiencing the death of a parent during childhood leaves mental scars that typically manifest themselves as isolation, low self-esteem, and trust issues. And having a poor relationship with your family (say, for example, because they try to murder you or lock you in a tower) raises the risk that you're going to have trouble forming functional relationships in the future.

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"So ... how long until you reveal your ulterior motives and try to murder me like that last guy?"

That means that all of these victims of traumatic childhoods are entering into (young) marriages where the only relationship they've ever known was with someone who would occasionally transform into a witch and give them poisoned food. That's all they know about how to interact with other people. Studies show that a third of people who were abused as children go on to become abusive adults, and those who don't still tend to have other problems, like severe anxiety. It's not that trauma survivors can't find happiness -- it's that falling in love won't instantly cure trauma.

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"I can't wait to live in the castle where you locked me up and abused me!"