Marriage and the Happily Ever After Myth

Most of us are familiar with the plot format of fairy tales. “Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who was in trouble until her knight in shining armor showed up to save the day and they lived happily ever after.” Unfortunately, I think too many of us approach marriage with this idea of “happily ever after” in our heads.

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When I Got Married…

I certainly did. By the time I started dating my first husband, my parents’ marriage was falling apart and home was not a nice place to be. Hanging out with him was a good excuse to not go home. And while we had a lot in common and a definite attraction to each other, I also viewed him as my knight in shining armor. I expected the wedding to cue my own happily ever after.

As I watch other marriages, I think many of us have this idea. We expect our spouses to make us happy. And when they don’t, when marriage isn’t the happily ever after that we expected it would be, we decide to bail out. We blame our situation (marriage) or spouse for our own unhappiness.

After our wedding, I was shocked at how hard it was to adjust sharing my life with this man I loved. We clashed over cooking together and hanging pictures. When we got home from work, we had different expectations about how we wanted to spend our evening. Looking back, I can see how our differing personalities and communication styles (and maybe pregnancy hormones) played into our struggles in those first few years, but at the time all I knew was that marriage was tough.

“Happily Ever After”

I had been aware of this idea of “happily ever after” for a long time. In fact, I’d felt some frustration that many books and movies end at the wedding, implying that life is great and nothing happens after that. I even wrote a novel in which my main characters got married halfway through the book and continued to deal with their character struggles and other issues for the next few years of their life.

This idea of “happily ever after” even pervades Christian fiction. While I love Susan May Warren‘s new Christiansen family series, I also felt this old frustration that the story ends at “happily ever after.” I was happy in her newest book to see Derek and Ivy again and to notice that yep, they’re still dealing with some of the issues they faced from their dating days, along with a few new issues.

I began to think through a lot of this last summer, as we finished school and transitioned into a new stage of life. I realized I had been expecting my husband to make me happy and, when I wasn’t happy, I blamed him. Letting go of that expectation that he would make me happy allowed us to have fun again and let me turn my energy into other things, like creating the home I want for our family (which makes me happy and in turn makes him happy).

Instead of demanding that he make me happy, I decided I would try to make him happy. I was surprised when several ladies commented, “But what about you? Isn’t he making you happy?” That had been my attitude for a while—and it hadn’t made either of us happy. Yes, I do believe that we as spouses can make each other happy, but I don’t believe we should expect or demand that our spouses make us happy.

A One-Sided Marriage

Unfortunately, my attempts to make myself and my husband happy in my first marriage failed. He never reciprocated my efforts; he didn’t really want me to be happy, but only wanted what would make him happy. And often the things that made him happy made me deeply unhappy. In the end, our marriage felt apart. I spent a lot of time thinking more about what had lead to the failure of my marriage and how my naive ideas about “happily ever after” had played into that.

When I began dating my second husband, we continued these conversations about what makes happily ever after. What do we want our relationship, our marriage, to look like? What caused our first marriages to fail and how will we avoid those pitfalls in the future? We’ve shared openly about the pain and hurt from our first relationships and the mistakes that each of us made. We’ve also taken time to read marriage books together and discuss what we’ve learned.

And then we did get married and live happily ever after. That’s not to say we’ve had a problem-free marriage. We still have seven kids between us with big needs. We are still dealing with our ex-spouses. We still live in a 40-year-old house that needs various repairs. Every day, we face little and big problems and stresses and things that need to be fixed. It’s how we approach those things that make the happily ever after happen.

A Real Happily Ever After

Our happily ever after looks more like Shrek and Fiona’s than Cinderella and Prince Charming’s. It looks more like Mr. and Mrs Incredible than Sleeping Beauty and Philip. It’s a really happily ever after, where we still deal with job stress and in-laws and ex-spouses and kids’ needs and home repairs and so much more, but we find time to kiss and hug and hold hands and do the things we love together. We put each other first in our lives, support each other’s hobbies, see each other’s needs, spend hours talking.

We didn’t get married expecting to solve each other’s problems. We didn’t get married expecting life to be easy peasy. Even at the start of our relationship, we faced various obstacles. Distance, our past relationships, and other factors made our relationship seem impossible at times. It took hard work, a lot of hope, and a lot of creativity before we were able to be together, but we carry what we learned through that into our marriage.

We know that “happily ever after” doesn’t happen just because we said “I do.” We know it takes work, effort every day to connect and love each other and keep our relationship strong. Happily ever after is not magical, but neither is it a myth.

What do you think about “happily ever after”?