Hello Smagglets! I don’t usually introduce guest posters like this but last time Coco guest posted here I received a lot of emails from horrified people who thought I’d callously broken up with Mr Smaggle, immediately replaced him and then blogged about my new lover in the span of about a day. Coco and I have similar writing styles (and I frequently publish guest posts under my own name because the internet is hard!) so I’m putting an extra disclaimer out there before people freak out that I’ve done the dirty on Mr Smags ‘again’. This post is by Coco, not me. As you were. Oh and Mr Smaggle was totally stoked with how supportive everyone was when we ‘broke up’. He thinks you’re all very sweet. Over to Coco with her thoughts on why Happily Ever After is not a destination.
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Isaid something really stupid the other night. In the middle of a state-of-the-union ‘Where are we at? Where are we going?’ type of conversations with my man, I said ‘If we do end up living Happily Ever After…’
Then I heard myself and said: ‘No, actually – fuck that. We’re not going to end up living Happily Ever After’.
This wasn’t a break-up. I definitely haven’t disregarded the possibility that I might in fact spend the remainder of my life raising fat, drooly babies and grand-babies (or indeed pirating the waters off south-east Asia) with this man. But I’m not going to end up with him.
Relationships don’t ‘end up’. Despite what Disney (and How I Met Your Mother and Sex and the City and Harry Potter) tell us, I’ve come to think that relationships only ever have ‘ends’ when they are actually ending.
A relationship between two people is an ever-changing, ever-fluid thing. By its very nature, it is always in the middle. There are make-or-break moments, there are crystallising moments and sure, there are moments when you look at someone and think ‘Holy shit – I want to look at you forever and ever and ever’. But they’re also characterized by never, ever knowing what might happen tomorrow.
Now, I totally understand why the writers of How I Met Your Mother, Sex and The City and JK Rowling went with their Happily Ever After conclusions: stories have to end and conclusive endings to great stories can be intensely satisfying. I know for one that I completely understood (in the sense of ‘no unauthorized sequels’) and appreciated (in the sense of Harry and Ginny, hurrah!) the epilogue to Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. But our lives are not stories and if they are the ending is…well, you know what I mean.
I got married once and we thought at the time that while our wedding was obviously a beginning it was also an ending of sorts. Person chosen, life (at least theoretically) mapped out. End scene. The beginning of Happily Ever After is always the end of the story. Except it’s not. My marriage didn’t last – our Ever Afters (Happy or Otherwise) won’t be spent with each other, partly (I think) because we saw it as a conclusion. I know many others whose happily-ever-afters didn’t come to be because of miscommunication, unfulfilled expectation, inability to compromise, death, and the greatest of unknowable forces: change.
But even those partnerships that do last aren’t the end of the story. Loving someone is hard fucking work a lot of the time and even when a relationship is joyous and synchronised and soul-to-the-wall committed it’s active and it’s living. It’s in the moment, not Ever After. Every day is an exercise in compromise, discovery and negotiation, in selflessness and selfishness. And that’s if it goes well.
But isn’t that kind of liberating? That there’s no last page?
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What do you think? Are you looking for Happily Ever After? Are you living it? Do you think it exists?
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P.S Carly here again! Here’s an article I wrote a while ago called How To Be An Awesome Partner in case you need a bit of a relationship shake up!
P.P.S I’ve been getting some feedback that people are ‘missing’ my posts so here are all the ways you can follow Smaggle so you never miss an update – Facebook, Twitter, Bloglovin, Instagram and the Smaggle weekly newsletter.