“…and they all lived happily ever after.” THE END.
What’s in a cliché?
There’s an exact point at which every love story stops. In The Princess Bride, for instance, it stops immediately after Wesley and Buttercup are reunited and ride off into the sunset (literally, I think?) True love was found, true love was lost, and true love was regained – THE END. In fact, they could not have possibly made a sequel to The Princess Bride, because the sequels would have gone like this:
- The Princess Bride
- The Princess Bride 2: Wesley and Buttercup Lose Some of Their Spark, But Decide to Stay Together Because Doing So Is Preferable to Breaking Up At This Point
- The Princess Bride 3: Wesley and Buttercup Have Kids, and Spend the Next 20 Years Raising Them
- The Princess Bride 4: Wesley and Buttercup are Now Retired, and Spend the Rest of their Lives Bumming Around in Florida
Understandably, none of these sequels were made (it would have been inconceivable!) Please try to come with a counterexample to my assertion that every love story stops where The Princess Bride does. “Hey,” you might say. “The Office doesn’t end when Jim and Pam get married. Jim and Pam don’t even ride off into the sunset. In fact, The Office goes up until midway through stage 3 of the sequels you mention above.” This is perfectly true, but A. one doesn’t watch The Office seasons 6-9 for flirty Jim and Pam moments, and B. The Office does in fact end at exactly the point that The Princess Bride does, but with Dwangela, not Jim and Pam.
This is also why soap operas and telenovelas (cough cough Friends cough cough) are notorious for not allowing their characters’ romantic lives to progress in any meaningful way. If you’re trying to milk the show/characters for swoony moments because that’s basically all your show consists of, you cannot under any circumstances allow your characters to get married.
More importantly, none of the above Princess Bride sequels could conceivably end with the cliché “and they all lived happily ever after”, even if Wesley and Buttercup did in fact live happily for the rest of their lives following the end of the sequel. There’s a deliberate ambiguity in that clichéd phrase which allows the reader/watcher to freeze time for the characters at the exact moment the story ends, and not consider what in real life would be the continuation of those characters’ story. Which, again in real life, would ultimately be either depressing (in the case of The Princess Bride 2) or remind the viewer of the characters’ mortality (in the cases of The Princess Bride 3-4.)
Hence, the Prime Directive of romantic fiction:
“Your characters are IMMORTAL. The viewer must not at any point be reminded that the characters WILL DIE.”