True Love

Canon Statements on True Love

I'm sure this is not exhaustive, but I think I've picked up all of the significant references. Additions and corrections are welcome.

Although the pilot refers to "eternal love," in the viewers-eye chronology, the first use of "true love" comes in 1.03 (“Snow Falls”):

Mary Margaret on her date with Whale: I want kids, marriage, true love, I want it it all.
Snow trapped by David: True love? It doesn’t exist.

Snow and Charming are from the beginning drawn as the in-universe gold standard for True Love (Romantic). This status is underlined by their personal "I will always find you" theme.

Episode 1.04 ("The Price of Gold") establishes that true love is not unique to them.

Rumple to Cinderella: I just wanted to make sure you were happy with your end of the bargain. True love, riches, happy endings.

 This pairing suggests that age is not a barrier to True Love. Cinderella is only 19, and her prince doesn't appear much older. It also looks like you can have True Love even if you're, um, kind of shallow and naive.

Episode 1.06 ("The Shepherd") establishes the existence of True Love (Parental) when Charming’s mother passes on her ring.

True love follows this ring wherever it goes, my son. I had it with your father. I've had it as your mother. Now you will have it.

You can have True Love with more than one person at the same time (a partner and a child). True Love is not reserved for the hereditary nobility or for heroes, but is within the reach of ordinary people. Nor does one need to be spotless; his mother had True Love with Charming even though they gave up their other son to King George due to financial hardship. Like magic itself, True Love is special but not necessarily rare.

The final important piece is placed in 1.12 ("Skin Deep"). Regina's roadside conversation with Belle reveals a fact which is apparently not well known to people in the Enchanted Forest:

Regina: All curses can be broken. A kiss born of true love would do it.... If he doesn't love you, well then the kiss won't even work. 

This establishes the mutuality requirement - one-sided love cannot be true enough to break a curse - and also makes it clear that you don't have to be a good person by any stretch to have True Love. Rumplestiltskin's feelings for Belle can stop him from doing violence to other people while she's watching, but that's the extent of her influence.

Finally, 1.22 shows that whatever magic True Love depends on, it functions the same way in our world as it does in the world of fairy tales; Emma is able to wake Henry before Rumple brings magic to Storybrooke.

Open Question

Can you have True Love (Romantic) with multiple people? Charming's mother suggests that one can have romantic and parental True Love at the same time, and I certainly hope one can have parental True Love with more than one person, or a lot of kids are going to be unfairly screwed. Whether or not romantic True Love can be multiple - either sequential or simultaneous - is not known, although they had a golden opportunity with Aurora, Philip, and Mulan. Boo.

True Love's Kiss

The curse-breaking kiss provides the sole inarguable method of demonstrating that someone has True Love. An (un)lucky few get to demonstrate it on-screen.

• 1.01 Charming wakes Snow from the sleeping curse
• 1.12 Belle's interrupted attempt to break the Dark One curse on Rumplestiltskin
• 1.16 Charming breaks the forgetting spell on Snow
• 1.22 Emma wakes Henry from the sleeping curse
• 2.1 Philip wakes Aurora from the sleeping curse
• 2.9 Snow wakes Charming from the sleeping curse
• 3.19 Regina breaks the curse on Henry (although see this really interesting post from winger-hawk on how the mechanics of that event were odd)
• 5.11 Brennan Jones claims that he was under a sleeping curse for hundreds of years and woken by TLK, and that’s why he’s still alive (my skepticism is literally off the charts)
• 5.18 Ruby breaks the sleeping curse on Dorothy
• 5.20 Zelena and Hades’ kiss breaks the curse keeping him imprisoned in the Underworld
• 6.01 Gideon disguised as Morpheus wakes Belle from her sleeping curse 
• 6.15 Jasmine and Aladdin break the curse on Agrabah
• OUaTiW Will breaks the curse forcing Ana to love Jafar with a kiss

The generic curse-breaking power of the kiss was ignored in “The Lady of the Lake” for some reason, perhaps to do with that episode's overall horrible plot.

When Graham kisses Emma (obligatory sobbing), the curse on him lifts. However, Henry theorizes that this is because they are mystically connected; he spared Snow, allowing Emma to be born, and this is not a True Love situation.

When Abigail kisses Frederick (“until my lips bled”, and we all felt momentarily bad for disliking Kathryn), it doesn’t work. Charming’s first attempt to break the forgetting curse on Snow likewise fails. Ditto Hook kissing Emma, with the caveat that there's no guarantee it would have worked at that point in their relationship anyway.

These kisses don't work because the cursed person is not cognizant of loving the other. I had an issue with this at first - it felt like there was a separate rule for sleeping curses vs all other curses. However, we found in Season 2 that a person under a sleeping curse is conscious, albeit trapped in a hellish netherworld, even as they appear to be dead, so I will allow it.

Taken all together, this suggests that True Love is not necessarily eternal. If magically forgetting the other person removes its mystic power, you can presumably fall out of love in a more mundane fashion to the same effect (as suggested in S4 when Robin cannot break the ice curse on Marian). It also supports Regina's early statement that True Love must be mutual. The kiss works on Snow the second time because she has feelings for David again, despite not having her full memories of him.

True Love and the Gods

When Emma tries to rescue Killian from the Underworld, they must first pass a test in which Emma’s heart is weighed. “Only a heart filled with true love may pass.” Emma succeeds in this test (5.20).

Although Zelena and Hades apparently share true love, in 5.21 Zelena becomes the first known character to kill her own true love, destroying Hades when he threatens Regina.

Pixie Flowers

A late (6x17) and in my personal opinion silly addition to the canon, pixie flowers grow wherever great evil has been, and their dust allows people who share true love to find one another, even across realms, by opening door portals akin to that created by the Apprentice. Charming and Snow use it to find Emma ten years into the first Dark Curse, and Emma uses it to find Hook when he's trapped in Neverland. 

Digression: Social Implications

In a world where True Love is an objectively verifiable fact and in theory available to anyone, arranged marriages look particularly cruel, yet remain commonplace in the Enchanted Forest. Even in a fairy tale, True Love takes a back seat to practicality.

I have to think it would create a lot of stress for people, too, wondering -- do we have True Love, or just the ordinary kind? Are we true enough? Do teenage lovers in the Enchanted Forest dare each other to get cursed so they can prove the depth of their feelings?

True Love and the First Dark Curse

Depending on your point of view, True Love might be nice to have and handy in a curse situation; for the magically-minded, it's a natural resource.

The first reference to True Love in the show’s internal chronology (to date) is actually in 2.04 (“The Crocodile”).

Rumplestiltskin: And so here we are. You've come to save the life of your true love, the pirate. I didn't realize the power of true love before.

True Love or only true-ish? We may never know. Me, I think that if you die stating your love for someone, that's a good indicator that it's the real deal in-universe. Yes, Milah abandoned her family, and yes, Killian's personality needed some work, but there's no particular reason to think theirs wasn't True Love. (Which would support the idea that you can have more than one True Love in sequence, leaving only the question of simultaneity unanswered.)

It appears that this is when Rumple became interested in the stuff's potential magical uses. When he killed Milah, he was not yet going down the Dark Curse road. He thought his route back to Bae lay in portal-beans. At some point he decided that wasn't going to get him anywhere and shifted his efforts.

His new plan is gloriously baroque. One the one hand he has to manipulate someone into casting the Dark Curse, as he himself is unable or unwilling to do. This will bring him to the Land Without Magic, where he believes he will find Baelfire. On the other hand, he has to make sure that the curse breaks while he still has time to go looking for his son. For that to happen, he needs a child born of True Love.

I consider his deals with Cora and Cinderalla in this light. With both of them, he was willing to make an exchange for a firstborn child. Was he, in both of those instances, hoping for a child of True Love? It's difficult to imagine what he would have wanted with a baby otherwise. And what about him setting up Charming with Abigail?

I must imagine Rumple methodically match-making across the kingdoms and the years, waiting for the right couple to come along.

What of his own experience of love? Whatever he felt for Milah, I think we can safely say that it wasn't True Love. I will give him the benefit of the doubt (only this once) and posit that he had genuine affection for her at one point, but only that. After her, there is Cora. Whatever he had going with her was not True Love, although it might have become so had she not removed her own heart. Then there's Belle, who provides proof positive of the effects True Love can have.

By the time Belle arrives, Rumple's curse-related machinations are well underway, but he has not yet encountered Snow or Charming. Once that happens, he identifies a candidate in Snow on sight, and takes one of her hairs (1.10). When Charming shows up looking for a way to break the curse (1.16), he must have thought Jackpot. With a hair from each of them, he is able at last to create the elusive love potion. Most uses of this term mean that it will make someone fall in love, but in OUaT it seems to be "bottled miracle". He uses it to create the loophole in the Dark Curse that will allow the child of those lovers to break it.

By magical rules standards, this actually makes sense.

Hiding the rest of the potion inside a convenient dragon for later retrieval makes less sense, but we can't have everything.