Reading women: negotiating the intoxicating morass of "happily ever after" and "happy for now"

Happily-ever-after and happy-for-now (HEA-HFN) stories influence women's expectations of intimate relationships and inform their understandings of what it means to be in love and to love. With age and experience, women learn to adjust their media-fuelled expectations as they encounter the reality of what is required to sustain long-term intimate relationships. It is a negotiation that entails wrestling with questions such as choosing one's way of being in the world, understanding what romantic love means, and, often, preparing for life as a partnered or married woman. Women from diverse backgrounds, with a multiplicity of identities, are familiar with this dominant script that has the power to direct their lives and their dreams. Whether fictive, cultural, internalized, socialized, enforced, resisted, or rejected, this social script makes finding romance and love, if not marriage, a global institution that is central to a woman's happiness and material well-being, one experienced within specific local and personal contexts. To investigate women's relationships with and negotiations of HEA-HFN narratives, I convened three reading salons with a group of nine women to read and discuss three novels. Based on these conversations and my review of our discussions, I selected three thematic categories for an interdisciplinary exploration: Trauma, Diversity, and Violence; Sex, Shame, and Security; and Aspiration, Experience, and Harm. The ensuing analysis of this reading salon experience demonstrates that the coupling imperative, through the medium of romance fiction, is still valorized and continues to have an impact on women's lives. Furthermore, a lack of imagination, one that neglects and overlooks the potential of alternative social arrangements, is embedded in this media form despite authorial offerings with diverse representations. Even with seemingly unconventional plot outcomes, the genre reflects heteropatriarchal, heterosexist, monogamous, capitalist systems and structures that marginalize women because women may win on the page, but women's rights are continually under threat in the real lives they lead. Romance fiction, along with other media forms that enshrine a coupling imperative, reinforces the challenges and obstacles women face in their quests for autonomy, agency, and authority in the world beyond the alluring fairy-tale promises of HEA-HFN narratives.