The 'happily ever after' lie

The English formula "happily ever after" emerged in fairy-tale translations and chapbooks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Earlier closing formulas in oral storytelling were more variable, sometimes including phrases that acknowledged ongoing struggle or moral complication. The smoothing toward a uniform happy closing accelerated with the Grimms, with Hans Christian Andersen in translation, and with the Victorian children's-literature industry. By the time Disney consolidated the form in the twentieth century, the closing was both standardized and entirely affirmative. The history of the phrase is the history of cultural smoothing, the removal of acknowledged complication from the closing of romantic stories. Each smoothing step seemed minor. The cumulative effect was a script that bore no resemblance to actual long love.

Older romantic narratives, in folklore across many cultures, often closed with acknowledgment that the lovers' union was the start of a new kind of trouble. They might have prosperity, they might have children, they might face famine, they might bury those children, they might part. The hard outcomes were named. The hard outcomes were part of the ending. The pre-modern listener did not absorb the lie because the lie was not yet told. Recovering some of this older vocabulary is part of the collective work. Not as nostalgia, but as honest description.

The wedding is a beginning, not an ending. To structure a story so that the wedding is the climax is to treat the wedding as the resolution of everything that follows. This is a structural choice and a misleading one. Most of what matters in a long bond happens after the wedding. The wedding itself is a single day. Building cultural narratives in which the wedding is the climax instead of an early act has produced an audience that has detailed knowledge of how to plan a wedding and no knowledge of how to plan a forty-year partnership.

Longitudinal research on marital satisfaction across decades, summarized in Cherlin and others, shows a U-shape: high initial satisfaction, decline through the child-rearing years, recovery in the post-child-rearing years if the marriage survives. The U is the typical shape. The flat line of happily-ever-after is no one's shape. A culture that taught the U honestly would produce couples who recognized the dip as normal rather than diagnostic, who held on through it rather than reading it as evidence the relationship was wrong, and who arrived at the post-dip recovery with the partnership intact.

Most marriages dip in satisfaction when children arrive. The reasons are mundane: less sleep, less time together, more financial stress, more division of labor that defaults along gendered lines, less novelty. The dip is normal. The cultural script provides no resources for naming it as normal. The couple in the dip wonders what happened to the happily-ever-after. They blame the partner, they blame themselves, they blame the marriage. The dip's normality is one of the most useful facts a young couple could be taught and one of the least taught.

Many couples that survive the child-rearing dip find that satisfaction recovers in the years after the children leave. The recovery is also a kind of work, the rediscovery of the partner as an adult companion rather than a co-parent, but it is real and it is well documented. The cultural script omits this too. The audience trained on the script has no images for the empty-nest recovery and is therefore not motivated to invest in surviving the dip in order to reach it.

Couples deciding whether to divorce often consult, implicitly, the happily-ever-after benchmark. Are we happy ever after? If not, the marriage has failed. The benchmark is impossible. Almost no marriage clears it. So the divorce decision is being made against a benchmark that no marriage was ever going to meet, which inflates the divorce rate above what a more honest benchmark would produce. This does not mean every divorce is wrong. It means the framing of the decision is distorted by the script.

People who divorce after failing the happily-ever-after benchmark often remarry expecting the next partnership to meet the same benchmark. The benchmark is still impossible. The next partnership also fails it. The cycle repeats. Cherlin's marriage-go-round is the population-level signal of this individual-level pattern. The cycle does not break by changing partners. It breaks by changing benchmarks.

Wedding vows that named what was actually being undertaken would mention: long stretches of moderate emotional weather, periods of attraction and periods of its absence, conflict that does not resolve, illness, financial stress, the loss of parents, the difficulty of raising children, the work of returning to each other after estrangement, the eventual death of one or both. These are the contents of the partnership being undertaken. Older vow traditions named some of them. Modern wedding industry vows usually do not. The mismatch between the vows and the territory is a small but real contributor to the gap between expectation and experience.

The mid-twentieth-century Disney consolidation of the fairy-tale closing did particular damage because it reached the largest audience in human history at the youngest ages. A generation of children learned the happily-ever-after at age four or five, before they had the cognitive tools to qualify it. By the time they were adults, the phrase was load-bearing in their unconscious romantic expectations. Recent Disney films have started to complicate the closing, but the back catalogue is the catalogue that trained the parents and grandparents of the current generation, and its imprint persists.

Cultures and subcultures with more honest scripts do exist. Older religious traditions name the difficulty of marriage in their liturgies. Communities with strong elder-mentorship traditions transmit, in conversation, the long shape of real marriages. Some recent fiction, some memoir, some honest journalism does the work. These alternatives are available. They are just dwarfed in cultural reach by the dominant script. The collective task is not to invent alternatives. It is to amplify the ones that already exist.

The formula does not need to be banned. It needs to be qualified, supplemented, and put in proportion. Children can be told fairy tales and also told that the fairy tales close early in the story. Wedding ceremonies can include both joyful and sober elements. Older couples can be invited to speak honestly about their long marriages at younger couples' weddings, anniversaries, and family gatherings. The lie is sustained by the absence of the corrective. Adding the corrective, conversationally and culturally, is the recovery. The result is not pessimism. It is a population whose expectations match the lives they are about to live, which is the precondition for actually living them well.

1. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 2. Cherlin, Andrew J. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Vintage, 2010. 3. Giddens, Anthony. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. 4. Fisher, Helen. Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. 5. Cherlin, Andrew J. "The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage." Journal of Marriage and Family 66, no. 4 (November 2004): 848-861. 6. Fisher, Helen. Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. 7. Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992. 8. Cherlin, Andrew J. Labor's Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014. 9. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. 10. Coontz, Stephanie. A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. New York: Basic Books, 2011. 11. Jeffers McDonald, Tamar. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. 12. Epstein, Robert, Mayuri Pandit, and Mansi Thakar. "How Love Emerges in Arranged Marriages." Journal of Comparative Family Studies 44, no. 3 (2013): 341-360.