Shatter Your Glass Slipper: One Single Woman’s Review of Damona Hoffman’s F the Fairy Tale
Love simply isn’t the fairy tale we were promised as children. The Disneyfication of “true love” amplified the idea of happily ever after as an effortless union of Prince and Princess. But in reality, if you’re running home at midnight and losing a shoe, you’re probably drunk…or escaping a predator. Seriously, how many of us could have ended up in a true crime documentary due to our experiences on dating apps?
If you feel like you’re always chasing that “happily ever after,” love guru and celebrity dating coach, Damona Hoffman, has advice for you. F the Fairy Tale (Seal Press, 2024) is an amalgamation of a love expert’s insights from her last twenty years as a dating coach, advice columnist for LA Times and Washington Post, and most recently, her career as the official love expert on the Drew Barrymore Show. Her experience and depth of knowledge when it comes to the best practices around modern dating provides readers with humorous and authentic guidance in F the Fairy Tale.
Hoffman expertly lays out the, often anxiety inducing, stages of dating – the mindset, the search, the date, and the future – as the four sections of her book. In each of the stages, she considers the social and psychological implications of how the dating game has rapidly changed over the last twenty years, highlighting the impact of travel, technology, and feminism. Each of these cultural shifts have transformed our wants and needs in lifestyle – especially in how we relate and date others. Our ability to physically travel and connect virtually with potential matches internationally widened our “playing field,” and women’s aptness to provide for themselves ousted the traditional gender roles, which allowed women to ask a question their grandmothers never could, “What do I really want from a relationship?”
If you feel like you’re always chasing that “happily ever after,” love guru and celebrity dating coach, Damona Hoffman, has advice for you.
Yet, Hoffman contends that even though women (and men) are able to ask what it is they want, we still subscribe to four prevalent outdated myths around love. She deconstructs The List Myth (possessing a desired set of qualifications to date),The Rules Myth (dos and dont’s or hacks for finding love to adhere to), The Chemistry Myth (immediate romantic sparks or else…boy bye!), and The Soulmate Myth (there’s only one perfect match), unpacking how each is detrimental, not only when we are looking for love, but also as belief systems that linger and can cause issues once we are in a relationship. As the book moves through the dating process, she illuminates how problematic these cultural dating myths are in our quest for love and serves up humorous anecdotes, case studies, client questions, and clear methods on how to break free of old myths and rules that do not serve us.
Instead of focusing on the hangups we have around “how” we find the one, the author provides four pillars for a successful relationship – goals, values, communication, and trust – and helps the reader understand how to cultivate those pillars both for themselves and with whoever they choose to date. What readers will appreciate most about this book is that Hoffman does not simply tell the reader what to do. Instead, she illustrates how to improve their quest for love by providing tools like journaling exercises, discussion questions, and intimacy building activities. If you’re into “woo woo” processing, Hoffman is for you! Some of the tools she borrows from includes the ancient Chinese practice of Feng Shui, as well as mindfulness practices popularized by the spiritual community like creating a vision board, and meditation or awareness practices for “reframing your samskaras” – what yogis call a person’s deeply ingrained patterns.
In a world full of ghosting, gaslighting, and breadcrumbing, F the Fairy Tale shifts the tone of dating from apathy to empathy. Hoffman illustrates the importance of recognizing our own humanity and the humanness of others in a process that has been reduced to algorithms, swiping left or right, and sliding into DMs. Her ability to provide useful and practical tools for mental and emotional processing in the difficult world of dating is refreshing and any single person looking for love can use the practices she shares as a guide to shift their mentality and have a better experience with dating in the modern world.
