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The Myth of Happily Ever After
“Happy Endings” is not only the story’s somewhat ironic and misleading title but also a likely allusion to the story structure many readers know as the fairy tale. From “once upon a time” to “happily ever after,” stories in this genre may be charming and teach a moral lesson (the good princess gets the glass slipper and the crown), but they promote expectations that the narrator might classify as “deliberately fake” or sentimental. Real life doesn’t offer happy endings; real life, and stories about real life, contain one “authentic ending”: people die, and characters die, if not in the story, then in any imagined extension of it. “Happy Endings” is narrated by someone who claims to understand how to write stories and who writes to caution other storytellers.
Both the interaction between narrator and reader and the narrator’s reflection on the nature of the art writers create are metafictional elements with a shared purpose: to make a point about story. What the narrator most wants to impress on the you addressed in “Happy Endings” is the truth about how all stories end—in death. No other understanding about how stories about people end is “authentic” or genuine. The characters in the story variations, their ages, their careers, their single or married state, their poor or good health, and their names are interchangeable details that, while they provide variety, do not evade a story’s essential structure: beginning (people meet), middle (people live with some degree of contentment), and end (people die). To believe otherwise is to be “deluded,” but the narrator also suggests that accepting that “happily ever after” is unrealistic frees writers to become “connoisseurs” of stories and to explore the endless permutations of the “How and Why” of life.
Cultural Measures of Success
Not only do the six story variations of “Happy Endings” overlap, intertwine, and ultimately end in the same way, but they also repeat certain details that stand in for a definition of what many people consider a successful life. The cluster of details include marriage, career, a nice house, children, and hobbies. The narrator describes these cultural markers of success with modifying words that also repeat across the stories. Careers and friends are “worthwhile.” Sex lives and hobbies are “stimulating and challenging.” Real estate appreciates in value, generating wealth. Homes are described as “charming.” The narrator never critiques these successful acquisitions but doesn’t applaud them, either. They are presented in a matter-of-fact tone as part of the “what” that writers must create to develop a plot.
Yet repetition is usually a signal to readers to look for a theme, an idea the writer doesn’t want to state outright but hopes readers will pick up on. For many people, a fulfilling career, satisfying marriage, stable home life, and time to travel and pursue interests are in fact worthy goals and markers of success. There’s nothing wrong with the markers themselves. But two ideas bubble up through the repetition of these details: first, achieving this kind of success does not alter the “only authentic ending” of all stories: everyone dies. Second, a character can achieve this success and still not experience a “happy ending.” John and Madge have it in story variation C, but John despairs over aging, commits murder and suicide, and leaves Madge a betrayed widow. Whatever success is, the narrator suggests, it’s not enough to have the house by the coast and the well-adjusted kids. Cultural expectations and measures of successful people are inadequate at best and may be misleading.
The Urge to Be Loved
A primary driver of the conflict in story variations B and C, which follow a more traditional conflict-resolution plot structure, is the urge to be loved. These variations offer mirroring conflicts. In variation B, Mary and John are young adults. Mary’s love for John is all-consuming but unrequited. For John, Mary is just a convenient source of twice-weekly dinner and perfunctory sex. She feeds him, pretends to enjoy sex with him, cleans up for him, and waits for him. Despite consistent evidence to the contrary, and despite her friends’ clear-eyed view of John, Mary wants so much for John to love her that she denies reality. She substitutes hopeful fantasies that a “much nicer” John will emerge if only she keeps performing in ways that she thinks will bring about this change. She finally dies in the attempt to arouse some feeling of love. The narrator dryly sums up her efforts: “this fails to happen.”
In variation C, it is John who desperately needs the love of Mary, a young woman in love with James, a young man who isn’t ready to commit. Mary’s love seems superficial; she likes James’ fun lifestyle but can’t share it, as a working woman. But John’s urge to be loved is existential. Although he has a successful career and a family, John fears his mortality as he approaches middle age. Securing the affection of a young woman helps John deny this fear and cling to a vision of his younger self. Mary participates in their relationship because she pities John and because the sex is good, but mostly because James is not available. When James becomes available, the threat to John’s fantasy self-image is extreme. No longer able to deny his mortality, he kills them and himself. He cannot live without her validating love.
