What Is Happily Ever After, Anyway?

Since I'll be spending most of my day tomorrow picking up people (Lacey and Darcy at the airport, my kids from assorted after-school venues), I thought I'd best write my Friday post a day early.

During my typical morning bout of procrastolation, I visited Alice Audrey's blog (among many others). One of her posts (about whether or not "cold feet" are normal for brides and grooms on their wedding day) got me thinking about romantic relationships in general. Specifically, I started ruminating on the question of what makes a romantic partnership happy and successful.

As I said in a comment on Alice's blog, I didn't have cold feet on me wedding day. I had "performance anxiety"--you know, am I going to trip coming down the aisle? am I going to faint during the ceremony? I going to mess up my vows (it was my husband who did that, BTW--he said "With this wing, I thee wed")?--but I was completely confident I was marrying the right man. And after 17 years of marriage, I haven't been proved wrong. In fact, to this day, some of my worst nightmares are the ones in which I either marry one of my ex-boyfriends or do something incredibly stupid and wind up divorced from my husband. Happy dreams where I never met my husband or didn't marry him are exceptionally rare. In fact, I can't remember one.

I assume this (among other things) means we're happily married. Oh, that's not to say we don't have our moments of discord. Nope, there's plenty of those! (And having three kids gives us way more opportunities to disagree than when we had none.) It's just that, on balance, our relationship is way heavier on positives than negatives.

Thinking about this made me recall a sermon our pastor gave about a year ago about some research done by a sociologist, John Gottman, on why marriages succeed or fail. (You can click here and here for his books on the subject.) And one of the things Gottman found was that the positive interactions in successful marriages exceeded negatives ones by a ratio of 5 to 1. That is, for every negative interaction, there had to be five positive ones or the relationship was on shaky ground. He then goes on to describe what he calls the Four Horsemen of the Marital Apocalypse (don't you love that phrase?): criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. When people start using these tactics with one another on a regular basis, they're headed straight for divorce.

I'm sure by now, you're all thinking, "This is very interesting, Jacqueline, but will you get to the point already?"

Okay, the point is this: how many romance novels have you read where the hero and heroine, in the process of falling in love with each other, have more negative interactions than positive ones? Perhaps I'm jaded by some of the books I read twenty or more years ago when forced seductions and, yes, even rapes, abounded, but it does seem to me that authors occasionally resort to having their characters do an awful lot of arguing and disagreeing as a way to ramp up the sexual tension. After all, if the hero and heroine are getting along famously, there's not much conflict, is there?

On the other hand, shouldn't there be at least as many positive interactions between the hero and the heroine as negative ones (I'm not asking for 5 to 1 here!) to make us believe the characters have enough in common that they actually can live happily ever after? That they might like one another beyond wanting to get into each other's pants?

I'm not saying this is the case in most romance novels. It's just that the ones that seem to stick with me are the ones where I felt rather sorry for the hero and heroine for ending up with one another. I've read a few of those recently, and while I won't say which ones or by which authors, I will say that reading them has convinced me I'm not into "dark" romances.

I have to say, in my own stories, the conflict is rarely caused by the hero and heroine not getting along. I like to show how the characters make each other better, stronger, happier. That doesn't mean there isn't conflict, of course, but it's more to do with their inner resistance to being the better, stronger, happier people they make one another become than anything else. Because I think that's a lot of what love is about: surrendering to becoming the better person you think you're not.