Beginning notice: This isn’t about my own life, nor is it even about two real people. It’s about something that helped me, as I grew up, to have faith in love and believe that it will always work out in the end. I know it’s not the most typical piece you see on this tumblr, but all I ask is that you understand how it personally affected me, even if it was just a story in a book I read once upon a time.
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Like any other little girl, I grew up on stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. These fairy tales were full of the kind of magic and love and wonder that the child mind craves, but I knew from very early on that they were just that—fairy tales. There wasn’t that breaking point in me when I finally realized that I wasn’t going to grow up and be fooled into thinking that I’d find a Prince Charming—I just sort of knew the whole time, like shadow in the back of my mind, that this was fantasy. It wasn’t real. And that sounds sad, but it’s not. It was just how I thought. I was a realistic child. I didn’t daydream much outside of the possible realm. It seems boring in hindsight, but I was content.
And then at the tender age of eight years old, I picked up the Harry Potter series for the first time, and all of that changed.
Now, not only was fantasy and magic perfectly within the realm of my imagination, it was plausible for me to invent and understand, too. I created entire worlds in my head, with Rowling guiding me by the elbow on the side. And amidst all those spells and enchantments and brilliant alternate worlds parallel to my own dull one, there was a tall, gangly, freckled boy and a rule abiding, intelligent, frizzy-haired girl. I identified with them immediately.
Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger’s romance is different from the princesses and princes of Disney’s also-magical-yet-strikingly-different world. When I sat down to watch a princess movie, I knew what was going to happen. I had the plan laid out for me nice and clearly: The princess is likable right off the bat, the villan has something against her and devises an evil scheme, the prince comes in and saves the day, and then he and the princess whisk themselves off to his castle and get married. I had come to depend on this cliche plot line for all romances, insisting that, because it was all that I had ever known, it was all that there must be. But with Ron and Hermione’s story—which, I am now convinced, is their own storyline, independent of but vital to Harry’s struggle—things were different. Different in a beautiful, gloriously individual way that altered my view of happily-ever-after forever.
The beautiful thing about Ron and Hermione is that they aren’t perfect people. Ron’s no wealthy prince charming by any standards (although he is our king, cough cough), and Hermione’s certainly not an immediately-likable, totally-perfect princess. In fact, from the get-go, Ron was the crude comedic relief and Hermione was stuck up and nit-picky. Not your average rapturous love story characters, for sure. They constantly bickered. They were always at each other’s throats. They frustrated the heck out of Harry, and out of us as we read through them squabbling with each other. But they had their redeeming qualities. By the end of Scorceror’s Stone, Ron revealed that he was brave and loyal like a true Gryffindor, and Hermione showed strength and the value of intelligence. And when those two sets of traits were meshed together, they created an exciting, tension filled dynamic between these two characters that you just didn’t get from fairy tales. From the first time I noticed Ron and Hermione’s actions, I was addicted—probably around the end of book two and into book three was when I started actually hypothesizing it’s possibility. And what a glorious possibility it was.
Now, if you’ve read the books, you probably have grown up with Harry, especially if you started reading the books from a young age. You waited for the next novel in the series, waited to share Harry’s his triumphs and losses. But we didn’t just grow up with Harry—we grew up with the whole trio. With Ron and Hermione as well, and, in effect, with their relationship. We heard them argue. We felt trapped in the middle when they weren’t talking. We giggled when they poked fun at each other. We all felt hurt and betrayed when Ron hooked up with Lavender and when Hermione went to Slughorn’s party with Cormac. We all felt safe and secure like Hermione did all those times Ron put his arm around her, and we all knew Ron’s admiration for Hermione every time she helped helped him along the way. We all saw it coming. But it was unlike anything we—or at least I—had ever seen before.
The beautiful difference between Ron and Hermione’s romance and any other fairytale I’ve ever seen is that Ron and Hermione’s love is so palpable you can practically feel it floating from the pages of the books as you read them. I love Disney, don’t get me wrong, but there will never be anything like Ron and Hermione for me. They were the first fictional couple I looked at and thought that I could see in real life. They were the first couple I rooted for with everything I had, without knowing entirely if they were going to make it, but praying to God they did. They were the romance that I’ll look back on when I’m lost and know that even through the horror of the war, their love survived. And it wasn’t because of some cliche plot line, or some evil villain that hated the princess and was determined to make her miserable. It was because they both fought, they both bled, they both cried, and they both persisted and never gave up hope in one another. And that, to me, is what real love is made of. In the midst of lies and destruction, love is the one truth that puts everything back together, and that’s what Ron and Hermione did for each other.
I grew up with Harry. But I also grew up with Ron and Hermione, and because they were with me every moment—because of Hermione’s strength as an independent female and Ron’s goofy but sweet attitude, I learned not to expect that cliche plotline anymore. I learned that love isn’t born from two perfect people with very little knowledge of each other—it’s born from pure friendship. It’s born from bravery. And even if you have bumps and bruises along the way, love survives.
And because they taught me this, Ron and Hermione will always be true love to me.