When it comes to true love on the show, that is sometimes up for debate. I have always thought true love should mean true acceptance. How can you truly love someone if you don’t love all of them? This is why I struggle to understand how people can be true love, if they haven’t known each other all that long.

True love might just be ‘soul mates’, sort of a magical connection and that is there whether the couple know one another or not. However, if this was 100% true, then true loves kiss would work when people had lost their memories. The show proved more than once, that the person with amnesia needed to start feeling love again (Snow to Charming for example when she took the potion) before the kiss would work.

However, this post isn’t really about the definition of true love. It’s about Rumplestiltskin and Belle and a theory I have about what went wrong in their relationship. How did we get from the true loves kiss in Skin Deep, to how their relationship progressed once they were reunited in Storybrooke?

In the episode ‘Our Decay’ Rumple finally stood up for himself. He told Belle that she loved all of him and I don’t think he was wrong. It wouldn’t have been true love if she hadn’t loved him as he was – and she met him as the dark one – after all the subsequent suffering she lost sight of that.

I know I said I wasn’t going to question the nature of true love. However, this does lead into my theory. I have questioned a few times how they were true love, given her intent when she kissed him was to break the curse of the dark one. I mean what did she say to Regina – “I could love him but something evil has taken root in him” – which suggests that she loved the man she thought he was under the curse, not who he actually was. I suppose it depends what she thought breaking that curse would do. Did she know it would take his power away? As I said at the top, I sometimes struggle to understand how true love can happen without true acceptance.

Anyway, they are true love and that is a fact. Therefore I choose to believe that is because Belle had true acceptance once. Perhaps at the beginning in Skin Deep it wasn’t something she consciously admitted because you aren’t supposed to love someone who is “dark”. Maybe she would have come to accept that if she had been able to return – “I’m coming back Rumple” – she declared right before Regina captured her and then she was locked up for a long time.

Rumple and Belle have been apart far more than they have ever been together. Imagine somewhere you went as a young kid, or something you did, or something you saw etc. and for years and years all you had was the memory. You then go back to that place, watch it again or go through the same experience but it’s different – it’s not what you remember.

If it’s supposed to be a good memory, over the years the mind romanticizes certain parts, plays up the good and obscures the bad. We’ll paint ourselves in better lights, we’ll give ourselves more noble reasons, we’ll ascribe more meaning or knowledge to the situation that only hindsight gave us, not something we knew at the time.

I wonder if that’s not what happened with Belle. She remembered loving Rumple but they never had a life together, not as a couple, and so she created a fantasy which didn’t match reality. She turned her memory of him, into something that he never was and I don’t think she even realizes that she did that. She keeps saying that he was different back then – but he was the dark one. He hasn’t changed.

How the warped memory affects their relationship
I’ve always thought that Belle constantly demanding he change and emotionally blackmailing him, to try and force him was wrong. She did that from the very beginning of their ‘reconciliation’ back in season two. “I thought you changed.” and Rumple says “What in the hour you’ve known me.” or words to that effect. She walked out but then she came back. She’s said a couple of times in different ways “promise me and then we can be together”.

Now I get couples need to compromise, work together, make sacrifices etc. but using love against someone, threatening to withhold it if they don’t do what you want is bad. I’m hesitant to label it abuse but it certainly isn’t nice. I know when it comes to Rumple and Belle, the haters of their relationship always think that Rumple abuses Belle, but to be honest I’ve always thought it more the other way round.

Rumple does lie to Belle but only because he’s scared of her reaction. He has this belief that if he’s not perfect she’ll leave him – and that belief is just justified because that’s what she does, all the damn time.

Well finally he stood up for himself. – “But if you want me to be a different man… I’m sorry. This is who I am.” – Why is that wrong? If the situation was reversed and he demanded she change for him then everyone would be up in arms.

Loving someone is accepting them for who they are. Belle once told Neal she loved Rumple – “all of him, even the parts that belong to the darkness” – but those are just words. In actions, certainly in all their recent interactions, there has been no acceptance of the darkness.

I’ve never quite got why Belle kept saying he had to choose. Having power doesn’t mean he loves her any less. I think maybe she got scared about what that power could lead too. Given Regina, the curse, Lacey etc. it wouldn’t be unreasonable for her to have a fear of magic. She once saw magic kill Rumple, and then it killed Neal and then Rumple was never the same.

After he was free from Zelena, the darkness took over and Rumple lost control. He went after the hat because he thought that would save him. The dagger made him a slave, I can certainly understand the fear of being controlled. The first thing Zelena ordered him to do was kill Belle. He said in Our Decay that he “loved the dagger” but it’s the power the dagger represents.

Belle once used the gauntlet and she thought that power was what he loved most. I think it’s pretty much accepted in the Rumbelle fandom that the gauntlet showed his weakness not what he loved the most – Belle has always been his strength. I really don’t see why he can’t have both, his magic and Belle. She first fell in love with him as the dark one – a sorcerer – so why should he now have to be anything less than himself?

Rumple said that Belle would see that “he was right” and I certainly hope she does. I think he is right. She said that she couldn’t condone him being like this again – but why not? What exactly is she objecting to? Rumple never did anything ‘villainous’ until after Zelena had killed his son, tortured him for a year and the darkness took hold of his heart. Oh sure he was never a saint but was he such a danger to the town when he worked with them against Cora? allied with them in Neverland to find Henry? defeated Pan?

I have written before that I don’t think anyone is all good, or all evil – we are both. Life isn’t so black and white, it’s just all shades of grey. I’ve long thought so-called villains made the best heroes, precisely because they will do what is necessary to get the job done. They don’t have the hangups about ‘I can go this far, but not that far’ and so they are a lot more successful than people that hamstring themselves.

In ‘Her Handsome Hero’ Rumple basically talked so much sense. It was like he finally understood the truth about darkness and light, perhaps even found that prophesied balance. Belle on the other hand was pretty sanctimonious and then after the events with Gaston, rather than giving her a reality check it pushed her the other way.

I’m wondering if maybe this sleeping curse is a good thing because she is now trapped in the hall of mirrors. All she can do is reflect on her life and maybe a period of introspection will give her the time, and the space, that she needs to realize the truth of the matter. That Rumple is the same man now, that he has always been – her true love.

I firmly believe Rumple’s true loves kiss didn’t work in the underworld because he didn’t believe that it would. If he had faith in himself, in that Belle did actually love him, then it would have been fine. However, he’s taken too many knocks to have that certainty.

It’s like they are fighting between what they consciously try and think, and what they know deep down in their subconscious. I thought it was very telling that Belle kept correcting people that Rumple was her husband, that her first thought on arriving in the underworld was that Rumple needed her – that she went to look for him straight away.

Basically Rumbelle’s biggest problem is their failure to communicate. However, I have every faith that they can do it because they are true love. So long as they love one another, everything else should hopefully work out. That might be dangerously naive of me but if the canon on the show lets me down, there’s always fanfic.