What is your image of the ideal relationship? What do you think characterizes true love? As you conjure up answers to these questions, which key ideas come to mind? Without even realizing it, chances are that your views about romantic love are heavily influenced by the myriad of cultural images not only in art, literature, drama, and music, but also those that stream through your social media feeds. From rom-coms to tragedies, Disney to Shakespeare, and love ballads to classic opera, romantic love tends to be portrayed in certain ways, often a far cry from the humdrum reality of day-to-day actual relationships.

These mythical portrayals often permeate people’s expectations about what it feels like to be “in love,” what the ideal romantic partner should be like, and how the relationship should play out over the course of time. Rather than being harmless forms of entertainment, these myths have the potential to lead people to let those expectations set themselves up for disappointment if not heartache.

According to Universidad de Sevilla’s Nerea Picón and colleagues (2023), romantic myths could lead people not only to expect too much out of their actual close relationships, but also to set the stage for “an unhealthy and toxic love model” (p. 2). Writing in a journal focused on social policy implications of research on sexuality, the Spanish authors believe that these myths need to be identified in order to reduce worldwide cases of domestic violence. Such themes as “complete surrender and dependence, idealizing the other and … forgiving........

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