Victims of Love and the Shadow of Aphrodite, The Love Goddess

Victims of Love and the Shadow of Aphrodite, The Love Goddess:

How many of your friends are in bad relationships? How many are single, having escaped from such a relationship? How many are wracked with jealousy and suspicion?
Where do we learn how to be the victims of love?
As little girls we are told of Cinderella, of Beauty and the Beast, of Rapunzel and Snow White, all rescued from the evil of elder women (psychological images of our mothers) by the love of a prince-and some of us are still looking for him.
Where do these stories come from, and what do ancient Greek myths have to do with it?
Aphrodite is known as the Goddess of Love, but she personifies more clearly infatuation and lust, the dark shadow of erotic love, the momentary passion that fades quickly into boredom or hate. Our stories for little girls speak often of first love, first kiss, and the thrill of infatuation. But the stories stop with a wedding, and never present the work that is required by any amount of happily ever after.
Many of the Greek myths speak of Aphrodite's wrath and punishment of anyone who displeases her. Her gift of Helen to Paris caused the ten-years-long Trojan War, but it was also revenge against Helen's father. Aphrodite transformed the heroine Atalanta and her lover into lions to pull her chariot. Aphrodite shed many tears over her young lover Adonis when he was killed by Erymanthos, a man she had turned into a boar because he saw her and Adonis together. Aphrodite was involved in the story of Ariadne, who helped Theseus defeat the Minotaur-Ariadne's Mother was tricked into bearing the Minotaur partly because her grandfather had told Aphrodite's husband that she was cheating.
Like a wild teenager, Aphrodite lives on her passionate whims, lashing out at anyone who is a witness to her infidelities. She does not take any responsibility for her life or her actions. Does that describe your friends? How many of us feel that we must take whatever relationship that comes along?
Aphrodite even personifies the evil mother-in-law in the story of Cupid and Psyche, which contains many of the themes of later fairy tales. Psyche is very beautiful, and is envied by her sisters and everyone who meets her. She is too beautiful for any man to dare to ask for her hand. Some people even begin to compare her to Aphrodite herself, though Psyche is only lonely, wanting only to be happy. When Aphrodite sends Cupid to punish Psyche for being beautiful, he falls for her.
The heroine in fairy tales is always magically beautiful, but in this story, it is Psyche's beauty that is her downfall. She has the usual jealous sisters who are married, but who envy her for her beauty. The sisters are eventually killed off, and Psyche becomes a goddess. We learn that we are never beautiful enough, that our looks are the important part of our being, rather than our character.
Cupid hides his identity from Psyche by insisting that she must never see him, but he sets her up in a magical home that takes care of her every need. We all have an unconscious desire to be taken care of, to be free of working for a living, to live in luxury and leisure. Of course, Psyche's sisters convince her to look at her lover, and he disappears into the night. When Psyche realizes who Cupid is, she searches everywhere for him. Despite his abandonment of her, he is the only man she has ever had, the only one she knows. Finally she goes to Aphrodite to ask how she can get him back.
Psyche is desperate, and she seems to have no resources of her own. So she throws herself on the mercy of her mother-in-law. Like our daughters, Psyche does not know any other story.
Aphrodite puts Psyche to several impossible tasks, sorting out beans, gathering wool and bringing back something from the land of the dead. Psyche of course gets magical help, and Aphrodite must finally accept her new daughter in law. In some of the old fairy tales, the ones that aren't published any more, the prince's mother tries to kill the new princess and her children. We have many stories of evil mothers-in-law and step-mothers, but we are not taught how to appease them or how to overcome their objections.
But in real life, we do have to sort things out, not just beans and lentils, but our own thoughts and perceptions. We don't have physical fairy godmothers to make the magic happen, and we have to face our own shadow side, the part of us that both leads us into darkness and makes us light a lamp to see who our shadow lover is.
We can learn to be conscious of our feelings, of our unrealistic expectations of marriage and family life. We can learn to recognize our own shadow selves by being aware of those people who make us feel irrationally jealous and irritated. We can learn, and we can teach our daughters that the shadow lover who insists on being invisible, coming and going as he pleases, is not good for us. We need to face our own feelings, learn to stand on our own feet, so that when we do enter a relationship, we are not sucked into the jealousy of Aphrodite