The End of the Affair, by Remittance Girl

For the last three months, I’ve been busy researching the ‘happily ever after’ ending. Yeah, I know you’re thinking: ‘what’s there to study?’

Well, being an erotic fiction writer, I’ve always decided on my story endings based on what I think my characters are most likely to do. Sometimes they’re the type of people who are ready to stay with each other for a while, and sometimes they’re not.  Sometimes the plot leads towards a kind of settled commitment, but often the stories I write are about turbulent people who meet in turbulent circumstances. That may be a great setting for a whirlwind bout of hot, dirty and occasionally dangerous sex but, realistically, it’s seldom the foundation for a lasting relationship.

The truth is, I’ve never understood the allure of the ‘Happily Ever After’. I could never get my head around why anyone would want read a book when they knew how it would end before it began. But I’m in a very small minority, it seems.

What the last three months has taught me is that the ‘Happily Ever After’ ending isn’t just any old ending. The guarantee of its presence has a huge effect on who reads it, how they read it and why.

One of the most significant things I learned about ‘Happily Ever After’ endings is that their presence allows readers to emotionally commit to the story in a way few other genres allow. Knowing in advance that it will all turn out okay in the end allows erotic romance authors to be deliciously evil about the hell they put their characters, and their readers, through. It allows for amazing lows and amazing highs. Readers feel safe in truly allowing themselves to be transported into the storyworld.

Another thing the presence of a ‘HEA’ ending does is give the reader a little more courage to delve into the more extreme side of fictional kink. Knowing that the characters will emerge from their journey in a place of security and love allows readers to quell some of their trepidation about same-sex encounters, threesomes or BDSM scenarios.

Another interesting part of my research was finding out how wide the definition of ‘happily ever after’ really was. When I embarked on the study, I assumed that an HEA had to mean wedding bells and the threat of looming morning sickness. But social norms have changed. Emotional commitments come in all shapes and sizes now. Same sex commitment ceremonies, ancient were-pack joining rituals, body-merging, mind-swapping, and just plain old moving in together.

None of the authors I spoke with saw the HEA as a creative constraint. Most are romantics at heart who want to see their characters end up happy and together because that’s what they most like to read themselves. Many readers felt that Happily Ever Afters were not so much about formal commitments as they were about confirmations of the depth and intensity of what the lovers shared.

One of the reasons I chose to focus my study on erotic romance, instead of traditional romance, was because I knew that a lot of ER writers also write straight-up erotica. Many of them had written erotic stories where romance wasn’t a strong element. Most had written tales where the couple didn’t end up together.  Unlike traditional romance authors, erotic romance writers chose whether or not their story has the potential to be an erotic romance or just a piece of straight-up erotica.

Why is this significant? Well, as one writer said: if you write a story and just tack a happily ever after ending on it, it’s going to suck. Readers may be ready and willing to give their hearts over to the story, but that doesn’t stop them from being critical readers. If the ending feels wrong, because the writer hasn’t done a good job of realistically bring the characters to a point where a long-term commitment is believable, they’re going notice. And they’re going to be angry.

All fiction is in the business of manipulating the readers’ emotions to some extent, but the bond between readers and writers of erotic romance is real elements of trust on a level that no other kind of fiction I can think of requires. Readers trust their hearts, their sexual fantasies and their intellects to the stories. And ER writers are expected to repay that trust with passion, eroticism, and convincing characters who act in plausible ways.

And so, I have to admit, I’ve changed my mind about the Happily Ever After ending.  I’ve had wonderful conversations with witty, smart and insightful readers and amazingly talented, disciplined and genuinely ethical writers. Although these readers and writers may never meet, both groups are surprisingly aware of each other. They are present for each other in the writing and the reading process. And I was very honoured to get an insight into their remarkable literary relationships.

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ABOUT REMITTANCE GIRL: Remittance Girl is a scholar, a writer and a deviant.  She lives in exile in a small Southeast Asian country where she teaches and grows obscene looking orchids. Her fiction has appeared in more than a dozen erotic fiction anthologies: most recently in Violet Blue’s “Best Women’s Erotica 2012″. Her novels are published by Republica Press.