Postaday for June 5th: Happily Ever After. “And they lived happily ever after.” Think about this line for a few minutes. Are you living happily ever after? If not, what will it take for you to get there?
I’m told that tragedies and comedies are differentiated by whether people die in the end or get married. (Go ahead, make your jokes about marriage being a kind of death. No, really, we’ll wait). Happily ever after would seem to be the latter, then. And so, once a person is married, the chief conflict they faced (not being married) is resolved. I’m married, so I guess I’m living happily every after.
Tragedy and comedy in the sense of something bad versus something funny are two sides of the same coin: irony. If you laugh at it, it’s ironic. And didn’t Carol Burnett say comedy is tragedy plus time? I guess it’s tragic when a person’s efforts to get married are the very thing keeping him from getting married. Tell that story with the right soundtrack, and the rest of us are laughing.
I could get all pseudo-anthropological here, and say that human are animals, animals exist to procreate, but humans are civilized, and the juncture of the procreative urge and civilization is marriage. For once my genes have propagated themselves, my reason for being has been fulfilled. And marriage is the potential for procreation, so the conflict of my existence is mitigated by saying “I do.” Happiness, it would appear, is overcoming conflict.
Hooray for me, and so long, existential angst. You kept me occupied as a teenager, broody and unattractive (see dramatic irony, above) but that kept me out of the dating pool until I was older, more mature, and ready to meet the woman I married. Delicious irony indeed, good for a happy chuckle.
Of course, this is a very convenient point of view, and only a story-book one for the sake of discussion. There are lots of people out there living happy who have no intention of getting married. Lots of people out there who are “happily” married and not living happily ever after. Afterall, when the primordial soup was putting together the first few cells that would, billions of years later, become people, it didn’t give two-cents about story-books.
But telling stories evolved too. A way to justify that conflict, mentioned above, between the need to reproduce and the need to build roads and tall buildings. Marriage, in the end, is just another plot device. Make sense that in all the romance languages, romance means “novel.”