Is Happily Ever After Real?

by Aaina Jassel

Happily ever after. A wellknown phrase used for years and years to describe the ending of a story. But just how happy is it? The phrase ‘fiction is fun’ comes to mind when I think of a ‘perfect’ ending because that is exactly what it is, fiction. Yet how do these endings set us up for life? Do they give us unrealistic expectations? Or are they simply just a way to escape our own reality?

When we read fiction books we can get consumed by the stories, the clichés and mainly the way everything resolves in the end, creating the perfect ending in standalone novels or in those part of a series. The first novel to showcase this is called Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins. Over the course of this novel it’s a typical girl meets boy, they go through obstacles, big fight and then a romantic gesture which fixes everything. The end of this novel seems to suggest that this couple will last forever when in reality roughly 14% of people marry someone they met in school. Alongside this as soon as the couple get back together all their other problems seem to fade away and disappear leaving the perfect happily ever after we’re so familiar with.

Parallel to Perkins novel, The Sun is also a Star by Nicola Yoon follows a similar pattern. In this novel the girl and boy meet for just one day and manage to fall in love. As soon as that day is

over, the two of them part ways as the girl leaves the county. They lead separate lives for almost 10 years when a random lady, the girl and the boy all happen to be on the same fl ight. When the lady sees the girl, she goes to thank her about something that happened 10 years ago. The statistics of meeting someone you met once after such a long time is very low. This is when the boy realises that the girl is on the fl ight as well and the love, apparently, all comes back. In reality circumstances would’ve completely changed these feelings as both the girl and the boy would’ve moved on and only 1/50 people actually fi nd love on an aeroplane. These kinds of endings, the happy conclusive kind, allow us to escape our own reality. They let us explore a universe where love and fate can triumph despite everything being against it which is perhaps why they are so popular; so that the reader can feel more at peace with what has happened inside the fi ctional world as opposed to the chaos of our reality.

To challenge these seemingly ‘perfect’ endings there are the endings which are more realistic. These endings show life as it is, with fl aws and problems. In romance novels for example these are the ones where the couple don’t get together at the end or if they do get together, there are still problems that they face and they understand that they might not last forever. The fi rst novel that shows this is It Only Happens in the Movies by Holly Bourne. Throughout this novel the protagonist is fi ghting against love and clichés yet every cliché in the entire romance universe has been thrown in forcing her to make decisions. At the end, after the big romantic gesture, she decides to not take the boy back as she was moving away for a drama school and she couldn’t forgive him for what happened. In this specifi c novel the girl is left realising that she needs time to get to know herself; that her happily ever after isn’t with a boy but with herself. This is so much closer to the truth of real life where a romantic gesture doesn’t always work and say she did take him back they’d be in a long-distance relationship. The average long-distance relationship only lasts 4.5 months before it breaks down and 40% of them end with a break up. Most people fi nd that until they have found themselves they cannot enter a committed relationship and be happy.

Another novel ending which demonstrated this is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. This novel is about a girl who balances her two diff erent lives, school and home, to fi t in but one day something happens which changes her forever. She has to speak out and the ending refl ects how she’ll continue this journey. The ending embraces that this isn’t really the end, that there will be trouble along the way and that she can’t be quiet anymore. The last lines of the novel say:

“Khalil, I’ll never forget.

I’ll never give up.

I’ll never be quiet.

I promise.”

This I feel is the closest to real life out of all the novels I’ve read because it is just so true. One moment can change your life completely and you have to learn from it and then bring all you’ve learnt into the rest of your life.

All these endings match their novel. Each novel has a diff erent tone such as if the girl and boy got together at the end of It Only Happens in the Movies then it would contradict the whole novel and even the title but in the novel The Sun is also a Star if the boy and girl never met again, as a reader it would feel incomplete as if the story wasn’t over yet. Even though we all want to have the happy ending with all our problems fading away perhaps the endings we need are those fl awed, almost inconclusive endings. Do we need more realistic ending for novels or are we ok with these unrealistic expectations which keep us hoping for something more? Maybe happily ever after is what we’ve all been waiting for, after all that is the perfect ending.

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