We All Love Happy Endings

Who doesn’t love a good fairy tale? Cinderella loses her slipper but ends up finding her prince charming. Sleeping Beauty is awakened by a kiss from her handsome prince, and Snow White triumphs over her evil stepmother’s plan to destroy her by the kiss of …you guessed it…her handsome prince. It’s the classic good trumps evil narrative we all love. The prince gets his princess, the evil doer is vanquished, and they all live happily ever after.

The happily ever after template is a common cultural format that emphasizes victory over struggle, conquest over defeat, and the promise of a new and glorious future on the other side of pain and anguish. It is a template that gives hope and allows us to believe that a new tomorrow is just on the other side of the horizon. 

It’s All Good…Right?

It’s all good as long as you are the one who gets the fairy tale ending.

Real life, however, doesn’t always play out like a Disney fairy tale. In the real world, relationships end, people lose jobs, and life has a tendency to smack us upside the head on a fairly regular basis. In short, real life is often more like a nefarious Grimm’s fairy tale than a Disney movie.

The assimilation of the fairy tale, happily ever after ending, as a cultural norm seems to have really taken hold towards the end of the Second World War. The hope of a brighter and safer future loomed large in the late 1940s. With the expansion of the television sitcom in the 1950s, the happily ever after paradigm grew legs and began to show up as the generally accepted or preferred narrative.

The brighter, more hopeful mindset dominated movies, television programming, and radio broadcasts. The iconic 30-minute presenting problem, conflict, and resolution sitcom model helped propel the happiness expectation into overdrive. Happiness quickly became a highly sought-after and expected commodity or outcome.

The Expectation of Happy

Today, the expectation of a happy life is easily identifiable as the preferred norm to which the majority of the population aspires. We all want to be happy, and if we are not happy, we worry that we may not be normal.

As the happiness model or expectation has continued to grow and the cultural expectation of a happy life has solidified as a normative value, a somewhat sinister undercurrent of distress has simultaneously gained momentum. In alarming numbers, people who find themselves unable to achieve or maintain the happiness mandate are becoming concerned that their perceived lack of happiness and tendency for worry is indicative of some emotional deficit or illness.

The Relabeling of the Emotionally Distressed

As a result, sadness, loneliness, grief, fear, anger, and other forms of emotional distress have increasingly been redefined by the culture as abnormal and maladaptive. In large part, a whole industry of pharmaceutical, medical, and psychiatric interventionists has sprung up to identify, treat, and medicate the relationally, emotionally, behaviorally, and spiritually unhappy. Because after all, if we are unhappy, there must be something wrong.

What tends to get lost in this discussion about happiness and the desire for the fairy tale ending is the fact that real life is seldom an ever-increasing trajectory of increased pleasure and happiness.

Real life contains struggle. The presence of sadness, pain, and struggle does not make you abnormal or ill. It makes you a human being.

When we get lost in the fairy tale myth, we lose our perspective on what a normal life looks like and how to deal with the inherent difficulties that life brings. If you lose a spouse to death, it is normal to feel sad, lost, and angry.

Betrayal by a trusted friend can bring feelings of confusion, frustration, and fear.

People who experience great trauma may pull into themselves as a way of managing their pain and guard against further emotional damage. Much of what we label as mental and emotional illness could be more accurately defined as a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.

So, is the happily ever after ending nothing more than a child’s fairy tale? Is it possible to be happy even when life serves up complex and perplexing challenges?

The Good News is YES! 

Life can be a full, rich, abundant, and HAPPY experience because happiness is a choice.

Yeah right…

Now, before you tune me out…let me explain.

The inherent problem with the happily ever after model is not the desire to be happy. It is the way happiness has come to be defined. In the happily ever after model, happiness is defined as the absence of any problem or difficulty. Happily ever after conjures up images of blissful, trouble-free days where conflict is nonexistent, and everything I want is everything I get.

Happiness defined in this manner is not obtainable because it is founded on a false assumption that in order to be happy, life must be free of difficulties. 

We all know that life comes with its fair share of difficulties. So, if happiness were dependent on the absence of problems, happiness would be nothing more than an elusive, fairy tale that only happens to Disney princesses. The good news is that real happiness is not dependent upon circumstances or outcomes. It is an attitude or way of being we choose. 

Happiness, defined through the lens of choice, is largely a reflection of our fundamental beliefs and our perceptions. It is a state of internal soundness and peace that transcends our external circumstances or position. In many ways, happiness is a byproduct of an internal sense of well-being and contentment that supersedes the situation and often transient events that impact our lives. Thus…

Happiness is an internal event that has very little to do with whether or not life plays out in our favor.

The happily ever after model has unfortunately become a normative societal paradigm. As individuals, couples, and families increasingly strive to live out this fairy tale model in real life, they often become disillusioned by their inability to find or maintain a life free of conflict and difficulties.

They worry about their worries and anxiously fear that their relational and emotional struggles are evidence of some mental or emotional deficiency. Within the context of the current cultural definition of happiness, the ability to find contentment and internal peace in the midst of real-life struggle increasingly feels like an elusive and fanciful fairy tale.

The good news is that happiness, true happiness, is neither a fairy tale nor an unattainable dream. A truly happy, relational, emotional, and spiritual life is possible, even when life presents formidable challenges.

Want to learn more about living a calm, nonreactive, peaceful, and satisfying way of life? Make sure you browse some of my other articles on this subject and more listed below.

Warm regards,

Teresa 

Read More: 

Spiritual Formation

Relationship With Others

Desperate Dependency: Weakness or Wisdom

This article was originally published under Chrysalis Connections and was reviewed and updated in 2026 as part of the Natural Relational Health Institute rebranding and content expansion.