Issue #63: What could Happily Ever After look like, single?

'At 46, I’m living the life I’m meant to be living,' says author Marianne Power. On Perma-Singles, non-romantic plots and why the Happy Middle beats the Happy Ending.

It’s telling, what a person thinks about before they fall asleep. Once upon a time, in fact for most of my teenage and early adult life, I used to dream of a romantic Happily Ever After. Typically, there was an actual person cast into the Prince Charming role. Either whomever I was in a relationship with, or someone I’d been casually dating while not-so-casually imagining our future.

I wouldn’t fantasise about my wedding day. I’ve never really done that, unless you count eyeballing

Alison Roman

‘s nuptials on Instagram (which looks like the funnest event ever). Instead, I fixated on the fantasy of what comes afterwards: the running off into the sunset part. A montage of Greek island holidays; seaside weekend getaways; joint-owned Monstera plants; hosting friends for homemade lasagne & Articulate; Saturday farmers’ markets; Sunday roasts; reading on opposite ends of a tobacco-coloured Chesterfield. A future that would, somewhere along the line, blend seamlessly into eternity. I dreamt of happily ever after supplied courtesy of another person; it was the future that a childhood spent watching Richard Curtis films had prepared me for.

Although I hadn’t known it at the time, my bedtime habit was a form of cognitive refocusing. According to The Conversation, this involves ‘distracting yourself with pleasant thoughts before bed’. To give credit to my boy-obsessed teenage self (which is where this all started), cognitive refocusing can be a helpful sleep technique. More so than agonising over your mental To-Do list, at least. In my waking hours, it was less helpful. As any reformed hopeless romantic will tell you, being in love with the idea of love doesn’t bode well for reality.

Thankfully, I grew out of it. I’m not sure how. Maybe it was after completing my London dating Pokédex after a decade-plus on and off The Apps. Maybe it was through gaining enough real-life relationship experience to encounter the sobering realisation we all do eventually: that lasting happiness requires – whisper it – more than simply meeting the Right Person. As I entered my thirties, I developed a more realistic view of romantic relationships – and, in the process, quit this bedtime habit.

And yet, a decade and a half of mental training took its toll. I hadn’t realised quite how much until I began writing fiction.