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ROM-COMS AND FAIRY TALES
When my wife was a little girl, some elderly neighbours gave her a book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It became one of her most treasured possessions. In fact, it is the only book from her childhood that she still owns. Some years ago, I read the stories myself – and loved them.
A typical tale runs like this: A beautiful young woman suffers severe trials and tribulations (often at the hands of a cruel stepmother or a wicked witch). Despite her troubles, the young woman retains her sweet nature and good-looks, and eventually attracts the attention of a handsome prince. He delivers her from her oppressors and whisks her away to his castle where they marry and live happily ever after.
What is ‘happily ever after’?
Why do these stories always end so abruptly? Why do they limit themselves to just three words – ‘happily ever after’ – to describe the post-nuptial life of the fairy-tale couple?
Personally, I would put it down to artistic reasons. Good stories, especially romances, need tidy, satisfying endings. But the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) had a different - and much more interesting - theory as to why fairy tales invariably stop at happily-ever-after.
By his account, the hero and heroine’s blissful future life is glossed over because nobody - not even a child - would take it seriously if it were laid out in detail. Life is not about pure romance and unalloyed joy. Far from it. It is about striving, desiring, struggling and longing.
Schopenhauer (who was, it must be said, notoriously pessimistic) maintained that the purpose of sexual love is not to find a partner who will make us happy and contented. Love is, rather, an overwhelming biological urge dedicated to one purpose and one purpose only: procreation.
The “longing that closely associates the notion of an endless bliss with the possession of a definite woman, and an unutterable pain with the thought that this possession is not attainable,” is, according to Schopenhauer, a delusion. It is nature’s way of tricking us into having babies. “Contrary to expectation, [the lover] finds himself no happier than before; he notices that he has been the dupe of the will of the species.”
Few of us adopt such a gloomy outlook on life and love as Schopenhauer did. But even so, we all recognise realise that there is more to love than fairy-tale romance and happily-ever-after.
Or do we?
Real life versus rom-coms
A recent study by relationships experts at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, suggests that we are more susceptible to fairy-tale notions of romance than we might think.
Researchers, Dr Bjarne Holmes and Kimberly Johnson, have found that romantic comedies such as Notting Hill, The Wedding Planner and Runaway Bride are promoting unrealistic expectations about love.
Dr Holmes says that marriage counsellors often talk to couples who believe that that if someone is meant to be with you they will know what you want without you having to tell them, and that sex should always be perfect. Evidence is emerging that unrealistic notions such as these tend to be embraced enthusiastically by devotees of rom-coms.
For example, in one test, student-volunteers were found to be more likely to believe in romantic fate and destiny after watching the 2001 film, Serendipity.
Dr Holmes says, “The problem is that while most of us know that the idea of a perfect relationship is unrealistic, some of us are more influenced by the media than we realise.”
Real love
I find this research fascinating. We modern-day, highly-educated people like to think that our beliefs are rational and sensible. Yet it seems that when it comes to love and romance, we are still influenced by fairy tales.
Don’t get me wrong. I like a good romantic comedy as much as the next man (though perhaps not quite so much as the next woman). I am not ashamed to admit to having shed a manly tear or two at the climax of films like Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary.
But, on behalf of men everywhere, I would like to point out that no-one can live up to the romantic ideal portrayed so brilliantly by actors like Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. Not even Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.
