Why Most of Us Love Happy Endings?

We love happy endings.  That's the fact.

In movies and TV series, we hate the idea of watching lead characters die in the end or lovers end up with another person instead of the love interest we rooted for. We feel cheated when the male or female lead choose to fall in love with another. 

We prefer the happily-ever-after format. We always do.

We hate miserable endings. We don't like love teams to separate at the end of the story or lead characters to break ties in the end. We want to see them end up together, walk into the sunset holding hands and build a happy home.

It gets us affected when we hear stars go on separate ways or celebrity couples end up in separation. And we always feel elated when we hear two lovable celebrities tying the knot or lead stars in the movies or soap operas we followed going into a relationship. Fairy tale sort of thing.

I like happy endings too. 

I belonged to a generation literally poisoned by fairy tales. I always thought life has always a perfect moment to celebrate love and sweetness, togetherness and cuteness. I love romantic books, I read them with hope that one day I could find my own prince charming. I thought life was like that. When I was still in college, one of my favorite hobbies was to rewrite brutal stories I saw in movies into a plot that retells peace, undying love and happiness.

I grew up with the idea that our lives are designed for happy endings. And there's no room for misery and sadness and loneliness. That we will end up with someone we love, with someone we choose to be with. That we can always have the life we dreamed of. That we can always pick the one we like without complications. That the luxury of choosing the one we wanted is always possible, always real.

When I started working, the magic of my innocence slowly drifted away. Eventually, I realized that problems are everywhere and not all humans are accorded with happy endings. Finally, the life I had imagined when I was still very young never really come into full circle. Until I recognized that the concept of "and they lived happily ever after", can only be found in fairy tale books. 

In the real world, we are bound to suffer, to experience pain, to undergo distress and emptiness, we will eventually end up rejected, unwanted, abandoned. There will be painful days thinking why we were not the one being chosen.  

There will be doors that will be shut off. Windows that will be sealed. Failures that will shock us. There will be more suffering, more defeats. There will be moments of agony and loneliness. Moments that we feel we are truly alone and empty. With no one to reach out.

But there will be time also that we will realize life is not always like that. There will be tomorrows. So we should never get tired of tomorrows because it tells a different story. A story that might change our life for the best.

We will eventually realize that nothing is permanent in this world. There's always a good balance between sadness and happiness, success and failures. When we attain the fullness of being human, and the lessons of the generations, we will understand that there are always two sides of life, to find our balance.

So why most of us love happy endings?

Maybe because we are already tired hearing all the ugly news in the surroundings, traffic congestion, murders, street crimes, wars, diseases, even the barking of dogs in the neighborhood. We are so exasperated with life that we want to escape into a state where there’s an everlasting peace and happiness and love, where people can be with the one they love and can laugh all day. Can experience that beautiful, perfect moment.

The thought about happy endings provided us with a great relief and a temporary seclusion from everyday clutters of life. We feel elated and inspired to hear celebrities fall in love because they are our idea of pleasure and happiness, they are our source of enjoyment and entertainment. We frame them in a happy world filled with delight and brilliance. 

We love films and TV series that speak about love and romance and togetherness because they are our escape from the brutal reality of life and inconveniences in the environment and disappointment in ourselves. With it, we found a place to explore our fantasy of a better and beautiful life. We are not really obsessed with the plot, we are obsessed with the idea that we can escape from reality.

Why we behave something like this? 

Maybe because we are raised in a society that abhors sufferings. We don’t like the idea of taking so many sacrifices, of experiencing so much pain and distress and misery. All we want is comfort and delights and affection.  We always associate loneliness and sufferings to misfortune and curse. 

We always have this concept of a beautiful life fulfilled by romantic films that's why we love happy endings. It brings a feel good factor in us. It makes us believe that everything works well in the world and something deep inside is being fulfilled.

While sad endings will always leave us in shock and bring us back to the real world. It makes us face the sad reality in life we are trying to escape. It will force us to face our own demons. It digs frustration from the deeper sense that it leaves us troubled and sad. It makes us see our own failures and disappointments.

But life is no joke. As what I've realized, pain and misery are part of being human, part of our life's cycle, part of our struggle to be a better person. It is inevitable and will eventually happen. Happy endings can actually be achieved in reality but it does not mean we don’t experience tribulations along the way. We need to pass all those afflictions to appreciate life in a deeper sense.

We need to grow. We need to change our perspective in life. We need to embrace our faults and rough side. We need to accept the other side of happiness, the other side of relating that not all people we meet will like us or will stick with us. 

When I thought about the sad ending of the movie, Titanic, my sentiments had changed. I no longer complained why James Cameron killed Jack Dawson in the end, and why the story did not have a happy ending. Because I understand, it speaks about reality, about the truth we need to undergo in this world.

Not everyone of us would anyway have happy endings. It’s only a juvenile concept of life that everyone would end up happily-ever after. But we can make our life happy, everyday is a struggle but we can choose to be happy.