In My Words: Looking Beyond Happily Ever After

The optimist in me loves a story with a happily ever after.

The realist in me knows there is more to happily ever after than fairy tales tells us.

Cinderella marries the prince. Ditto Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel and Belle and Ariel. We close the storybook or watch the movie screen fade to black, the words "And They Lived Happily Ever After" disappearing as the houselights brighten.

The End.

Or is it?

In a fairy tale, sure. The words "Happily Ever After" sum up the rest of the story.

But what about real life--the world you and I live in?

I don't know about you, but I don't live inside a fairy tale. My husband Rob is a wonderful guy--truly heroic in many ways. But there was no Walt Disney-inspired magic about our relationship--no fairy godmother or lost glass slippers or spells to be broken. We fell in love, experiencing emotional bumps and bruises along the way.

When we vowed to love one another "for better, for worse," we never imagined how bad "worse" could be. We were optimistic, hope-filled newlyweds, oh-so-clueless about marriage.

Falling in love is an a-ma-zing experience. Consider romance movies or novels--aren't they mostly about two people falling in love, despite obstacles and misunderstandings and those "we shouldn't fall in love but we are" feelings warring against one another?

Staying in love--what happens beyond happily ever after--that's what real life is about. Consider these lyrics from the song "Happy Ending" by Sugarland:

We all know the stories

We all know the fairy tales

We all get the glory of making it for ourselves

From the beginning

We're all looking for a happy ending

Every dream of winning

Every love we've been in

Right from the beginning

We're all looking for a happy ending

In my writing life, I stop with the happy ending. In my real life, happily ever after is just the beginning of discovering the rest of the story--and what a happy ending looks like.

What about you? Do you like both romance and realism in a book? Or is a romance novel an escape from real life pressures, allowing you to savor a happy ending without  the intrusion of any harsh realities? 

photo by  channah/stockxchang.com