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Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
So Ross and Rachel finally got together on Friends? Now there's an unexpected narrative turn. After ten years of supposedly celebrating singleness, NBC's popular comedy finally concluded with the equivalent of "they all lived happily ever after"—in pairs. Even the highly idiosyncratic Phoebe found a suitable mate in the last season, joining Monica and Chandler, who had already enjoyed a few seasons of marital bliss. Only Joey finished the series unattached. Why? The character is slated for a spinoff come fall, and a committed relationship would severely limit his narrative possibilities.
And Friends wasn't alone. On the comics page, cartoon Cathy, after over 20 years of making single people appear pathetic, will do the same for married folks by tying the knot with her longtime boyfriend, Irving, this coming Valentine's Day. And over on HBO, the women of the often edgy Sex and the City ended their run no differently than the heroines of a standard romance novel: married or clearly committed to a longterm relationship. As on Friends, even the most extreme character, Samantha, whose sexual adventures rivaled Wilt Chamberlain's, completed the series tamed by love. As for the show's main character, Carrie: after years of emotional kerfuffle, she and her erstwhile lover, Mr. Big, finally find true love in (you guessed it) Paris. And it gets worse: the series, which openly questioned the notion of a soulmate, ends with our heroine standing on a bridge in Paris, hearing the fateful words, "Carrie, you're 'The One.' " So much for edgy. Cue the violins.
I know I should be upset about all of this. After all, not only am I single, but I've written elsewhere about the importance of articulating a theologically grounded, mature appreciation for singleness. By all rights, these endings should simply irritate me. Despite feminism and postmodernism and every other available ism, are we really still stuck with only the two classic resolutions: marriage or death? But I have to be honest: I'm a sucker for romance, and I'm annoyed if I read or watch a romantic comedy and the couple doesn't get together—even when I think that's a pretty bankrupt idea in real life. And I don't think I'm the only one. We have to admit that the ideology of romance is very compelling, so much so that "she lived happily ever after with supportive friends and family and satisfying work" just doesn't seem as good.
As I've thought about this, I've decided that perhaps I come by my ambivalence honestly. After all, who does romance better than a spinster? The real specialists in the genre are my heroes, the scribbling single women of the 19th century, the writers every girl seems to read around the age of thirteen: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, and their sisters of the pen.1Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Little Women are the über-texts of female adolescence. They shape the stories we tell ourselves about what kind of woman we can be and what kind of marriage we will be "rewarded" with. Certainly, all of these novels posit that the virtue of being Elizabeth Bennet, or Jane Eyre, or Jo March—that is, being intelligent, spunky, outspoken, independent, yet morally upright—is validated by the awarding of Mr. Darcy, Mr. Rochester, or Professor Bhaer, men who are desirable because they recognize the quality of these unconventional heroines. Who wouldn't want to hear Mr. Darcy (or at least Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy) saying that one was chosen for "the liveliness of [one's] mind"? Or to believe that the companionate marriage described in the last chapter of Jane Eyre is a real possibility:
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