Sadoya Peynado believes that Prince Charming has a lot to answer for.

From childhood, women are introduced to the idea of Cinderella: the damsel in distress rescued by a handsome prince who carries her away to a better life where they live happily ever after.

The problem, according to Ms Peynado, is that real relationships rarely work that way.

It is an idea the educator, health coach and sex-therapy practitioner explores in three new books, Ghettorella, Cinderella and The Side Chick, and Rella, The Crowned Side Chick.

The interconnected series challenges traditional fairytale expectations and the effect Ms Peynado believes they can have on the way both women and men approach relationships.

“We enter the relationship with this fairytale thought ‘Oh my gosh, I'm gonna be so perfectly happy.’ There’s all these butterflies — we've all gone through it. But then reality hits. Real life comes at you.”

At the heart of the series is her belief that such expectations can affect both sexes: women are taught to wait for Prince Charming, while men are left with the expectation that they should become him.

For Ms Peynado, the books are quite a departure from Sex, Food and Chronic Illness: Feed Your Libido and Eat For A Stronger Libido: Sex, You and Food, which grew out of her work in health and wellness.

They are also far removed from You Were My Teacher Too: We Learn Together, her tribute to six boys who helped to shape her approach to teaching.

“My books with my boys are for my children, from my heart, completely different from the pathway that I have created with my health coaching, my sex therapy, and the books that I wrote previously,” she said.

“[My latest books are] strange for a genre, I would admit, [but] it's what's in me.”

The idea for the series grew partly from conversations with clients and partly from the relationship debates Ms Peynado repeatedly encountered on social media.

She noticed the same complaints coming up: men frustrated that women were no longer fulfilling traditional roles and women questioning why they should continue to fulfil those roles when men had changed too.

“Men are saying women are not submissive any more, and women are saying men are not kings for us to submit to any more. The genders are going in the opposite direction, but yet expecting the same outcome.”

Ms Peynado believes that instead of acknowledging how both men and women have changed with the times and what that means for relationships, people sometimes become preoccupied with blaming each other.

“It becomes: women aren't this way any more, so I won't support her financially. And women are saying: men aren't this way any more, I can feed myself, I don't need a man,” she said.

Her work with clients reinforced that view.

“When I talk to clients, it often comes back to the reality of what's happening in their home, what's happening within them and why they are the way they are. Childhood trauma and other experiences all connect,” she said.

“I'm not your girlfriend. I'm not your cousin. I'm not your mother. I'm a complete stranger. We're going to talk about it from an angle that you probably wouldn't talk about to them. Then they see things differently.”

The discussions helped to convince her there was both interest in and a need for her books.

“People want to talk about sex, and people want to talk about relationship drama [but] not necessarily the portion of it that actually brings healing. They mostly want to talk about the chaos of it, and that's where the problem continues.”

Ms Peynado hopes her books move the conversation beyond the drama by examining love and the expectations surrounding it from different perspectives.

Ghettorella challenges the fantasy that Prince Charming will arrive to rescue a woman from a difficult life.

“It's a description of what the relationship looks like in the ghetto versus the myth of Cinderella and Prince Charming that we're brought up on, that we’re nurtured into believing,” Ms Peynado said.

“[Because of Cinderella] our expectation of a relationship is that it should look like this: Here I am, a damsel in distress, and Prince Charming is coming to rescue me, and we're going to live happily ever after. But the reality of life is not like that.”

Cinderella and The Side Chick turns its attention to the prince and questions the assumption that wealth, status or an outwardly perfect life necessarily makes someone a good partner.

Ms Peynado believes the Cinderella story can encourage the expectation that finding the right man will solve everything, without requiring the woman herself to grow or change.

“It's like somewhere in our heads [we think] we're going to find a man that's rich and wonderful. His life's together, and he's going to come and take us from our broken life, and he's going to make life perfect, and we don't have to become or be anything. We don't have to grow from where we are, because life is perfect with him,” she said.

“Money may provide that life where we could just relax and enjoy the luxurious life, but the man that we're with, what husband will he be if he has not been groomed by a realistic life?”

Rella, The Crowned Side Chick takes readers beyond the point where the traditional Cinderella story ends.

“We're in the kingdom and we're going to see what actually goes on once Cinderella gets married to Prince Charming,” Ms Peynado said.

“[In the original tale] nobody's gone behind the doors. The story ends with, ‘And they lived happily ever after.’ What is ever after? What does that look like?”

For Ms Peynado, challenging the fairytale does not mean giving up on relationships. It means abandoning the expectation that another person will arrive and make life perfect.

“You get out what you put in,” she said. “My mission is to just help people live a more authentic, empowered and emotionally aligned lifestyle. That's the objective of it all.”

• Copies of Ghettorella, Cinderella And The Side Chick, and Rella, The Crowned Side Chick are available onAmazon.com