There is one incredibly important way that the shiny romantic comedy genre differs from the cold and grimy indignities of reality, and it explains the global love affair (pun sadly intended) with the form: the happy ever after.

It’s obviously not the only difference between reality and romcoms – for example, romantic comedies seem to believe that most women run failed cupcake bakeries, that you can fall in love with someone you hate with a fiery passion, and that most people keep their bras on during sex – but the happy ever after is the defining contrast.

For those unfamiliar, the “happy ever after” is the defining trope of romance narratives across books, TV and film, which posits the insane ideal that once the movie’s (brief) romantic conflict has been resolved, the couple in question will be in love together, forever. It’s also implied that such is the transformative power of that love, that most of their other problems (failed cupcake bakery, family farm being sold, gangrenous leg) fade into the background as a result.

The happy ever after is given to us in a climactic and usually iconic scene that often involves running: Billy Crystal sprinting through the streets of New York to declare his love for Meg Ryan before the ball drops, Hugh Grant driving down one-way London streets to interrupt the press conference to declare his love for Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston inexplicably getting off the plane for David Schwimmer.

These scenes have to be huge and dramatic because they have to make us believe that love has overcome all obstacles. It’s this certainty that makes romance narratives so compelling – in an uncertain hell-world, at least we can disappear into a make-believe universe where we know love will always triumph. In the real world, obviously love does exist – but we don’t get the comforting finality of the credits, which tell us that, for these characters, they will be happily in love forever. We get all the uncertainty of being a disgusting real person who needs antibiotics for their rotting leg wound and a prenup.

All the best romantic comedies have a big happy ever after ending – which is why it was so annoying when the only thing left to write in my romcom was the climactic ending, and I got unceremoniously broken up with, out of the blue. There’s nothing like having your belongings put into storage, sleeping on your mum and dad’s couch and applying for one-bedroom apartments for you and your dog to really make you believe that not only is a happy ever after a myth but that love might actually be a lie.

There’s a unique humiliation in jumping on a Zoom call with your publisher and explaining that you can’t meet your delivery deadline because you’re too heartbroken to write the scene that’s meant to encapsulate the feeling of being in love. There’s nothing like accidentally writing a happily ever after scene so unintentionally depressing that you briefly consider rewriting the rest of the novel to become a sad literary tale about Irish teens who never learned how to be happy and enjoy having emotionally ambiguous sex. It’s one thing to break my heart, but making me miss my deadlines is unforgivable.

I didn’t like this limitation I’d discovered in myself – after all, an author’s job is to imagine things, so surely I could imagine the idea of being in love, even if I didn’t feel or believe in it any more.

Literary fiction authors use their imagination to invent a world where it isn’t weird for university lecturers to date their students all the time! Sport memoir writers imagine a world where people care about cricket, and cookbook authors like to imagine that people read all the stuff before the recipe.

Fantasy authors imagine things that don’t exist all the time too – dragons, magic, a world before the invention of toilets that doesn’t stink and suck – so surely I could use the awesome powers of my creativity to imagine two boys falling in love and having a climactic smooch? But unfortunately, I found myself stuck on the precipice of an imaginary happy ever after, bitterly wishing I’d written another book about old people solving quaint village murders instead.

Ultimately what helped me write my happy ever after was the same delusion that helped me recover from heartbreak and go out and fall head over heels in love again: turning my rock-bottom breakup depression into a necessary part of the narrative. When I realised that you can’t get a happy ever after in a romance book without earning it first through trial and pain. You need to have your rock bottom scene for there to even be a romcom in the first place – Bridget Jones drunk and crashing out about being “old” and alone in her apartment – before she can have her big moment of snogging Mr Darcy in the street with no pants on.

Instead of bashing my head against my final scene, I went back and rewrote the beginning of the book, where my character was sad and alone and hopeless – this time with added feeling. That made me remember what fuels our love of a happy ever after romance story – it’s the hope that this moment of sadness will one day end and everything will work out again.

All I needed to do was remember that to write a good end to my book, only a little bit late. The gangrenous leg will heal. To justify that big climactic moment of happiness, we had to go through the sadness first – a good lesson for anyone writing a romance book, or recovering from a heartbreak.

• Patrick Lenton is a writer. His novel, In Spite of You, comes out 1 August 2025