Everyday Canvas

"Happily ever after" ? NOPE!

Prompt: Happily ever after is just the start of a new adventure in a story. Write about this in your Blog entry today.

---------------

We humans cannot help but return to our ape origins, no matter what any religion says about our composition. One of those "aping" incidents is the "happily every after" phrase. In the Google search I'm going to paste after my two-cents on the phrase is: "By the 1880s, we can already find authors calling 'happily ever after' out as BS."

And BS it is as how I see it, since there is no "ever after" guaranteed to us people who are born to die. I had thought, once, I had the happily ever after, but my husband passed away. So there was an end and no ever after.

On the plus side though, be it very temporarily, the phrase makes people happy, like the foolishness of "the tooth fairy" and "the stork bringing babies" do to children. I guess even us so-called adults succumb to believing in magical happinesses, while true happiness comes from reality and how we face and adapt to that reality with logic, hard work, and understanding.

In all honesty, I tried to think of a story that started with "happily ever after"; however, the phrase at this point in my life turns me off so much that I was unable to write anything, let alone a plausible story that started with it. On second thought, however, here is something that popped up into my mind just before I saved this entry.
The prince said, kneeling in front of the princess, "Happily ever after? What do you say?" The princess, who was Scrooge's daughter, answered: "Bah! Humbug!"

Here is what my Google Search came up with the information about the phrase:

This particular phrase is recorded by the early 1700s, but by the 1860s it had become commonly associated with fairy tale and children’s stories. It especially appears in they lived happily ever after—making sure all the princes married their princesses in their castles and enjoyed the rest of their days. By the 1880s, we can already find authors calling happily after ever out as BS.

What, exactly, cemented this connection isn’t clear, as the historic sources of fairy tales don’t feature happily ever after. Nevertheless, the connection was sealed by the 20th century. Not only have countless stories closed with (happily) ever after, but the phrase itself has come to represent fairy tales and happy endings—and marriages, where happily ever after is the storybook ending we’re told to dream of.

Finishing actual stories with living happily ever after became cliché by the 1990–2000s, but popular media, writing, and speech widely use ever after in titles in everything from collections of fairy tales to self-help books on retirement.

Disney even has a wedding blog called Ever After. And, remember that Drew Barrymore movie Ever After, a 1998 fantasy romance?

Ever after has become so common that we can use it like a noun (e.g., we’re all searching for our happily ever after or he finally found his ever after). How … nauseating.


.