Realistic love: Contemporary college women’s negotiations of princess culture and the “reality” of romantic relationships

This manuscript examines the ways collegiate women perceive media portrayals of princess cultural scripts and how this impacts their constructions of romantic relationships. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with college-aged women, we explore how these women negotiated media portrayals of romantic love by (1) distancing from images they defined as unrealistic expectations and (2) selectively embracing media portrayals as revealing intimate relational ideals. We argue that their selective accounting for how they developed their definitions of “realities” of love exposes tensions in concurrently hegemonic conceptions of love: idealist (fantastical and emotional love) and realist (rational and practical love) needed to sustain long-term relationships. We suggest that these negotiations reveal an association of idealist love with youth and realist love with maturity, reflecting an ongoing privileging of realist love. We conclude by considering interconnections between late capitalistic ideologies and maturation