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JR. Forasteros - Sep 9, 2012
Teenage Dream
More From "After Happily Ever After"
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In 1981, 750 million persons around the world tuned in to watch a part-time preschool assistant named Diana Spencer get married in a ceremony that would cost over $110 million today. In a classic Cinderella story, Diana was rescued out of poverty and anonymity by Charles, the Prince of Wales. Her Prince Charming literally made her into a princess. And hundreds of millions of persons around the world tuned in to watch. Because we all love a good fairy tale.
Princess Diana’s story was everything we want in a love story. Hers was the classic rags-to-riches Romance. It’s the basic story we see in books and movies over and over and over.
Everyone knows there’s going to be a charming, brave, flawless hero who rescues a beautiful, chaste damsel in distress and they’re going to end up together.
It’s Han Solo rescuing Princess Leia from the Empire in Star Wars. It’s Richard Gere rescuing Julia Robertson from prostitution in Pretty Woman. It’s Leonardo DiCaprio rescuing Kate Winslet from her boorish, cruel fiancé in Titanic. It’s Edward rescuing Bella from… being sad I guess… in Twilight. It’s Batman rescuing Catwoman from her criminal past in The Dark Knight Rises (see? Equal opportunity offense!).
You can think of plenty more examples, and we haven’t even dipped into music yet. And these stories that we love, these stories we tell each other, these stories we consume to the tune of billions of dollars a year, are the stories that end like all good fairy tales do:
And they both lived Happily Ever After.
The Fairy Tale ending to this fairy-tale Romance is played out in the Wedding Day. This Romance Story is all about that big finish, the Wedding Day. Just since 1990, the average cost of a wedding in the USA has increased from $15,000 to over $27,000 (and that’s in a recession, remember!) We’ll never match Princess Di’s hundred-million-dollar affair, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. After all, we’re celebrating True Love.
The Wedding Day is the climax of the story. It’s the “Happily Ever After” moment, the culmination of the story-book romance that’s swept this particular Prince Charming and his Cinderella together.
Did you ever stop to notice that the Romance Script, this fairy tale our culture trains us to live, always leads up to the wedding day? We never find out what happens to Cinderella and her Prince Charming after the wedding. All we have is “Happily Ever After”.
