Recently, I've read several books that I have absolutely loved... and then the Happily Ever Epilogue happened.
I get it. I really do. A lot of people who read romance want to have that confirmation that the characters they loved so much got their happily ever after. They want to see the rings and the babies and the fact that the sex didn't go out of the relationship when all of the drama and intensity of falling in love faded. Like I said, I get it. I am just absolutely not one of those people and I've really been digging into this in my head as to what it is about what I call the Happily Ever Epilogue that I don't like.
I'm someone who wants a happy ending to a story, I really am. Honestly, that's one of the biggest reasons that I read romance novels, because I know that when the story ends the resolution will be a happy one. For me, though, a happy ending doesn't require a Happily Ever After and I don't need or want some written confirmation that these two characters have a picket fence life however many years after the end of the book. In fact, a lot of times this kind of ending actually takes away from the story because the actual story ends and then there's this random time jump to a generally pretty mundane scene that has nothing to add to the actual story, just a little (usually boring) snippet of a future that we didn't watch the characters get to. For me, the only epilogues that are necessary - or even worth having in a book - are the ones that resolve something that couldn't realistically be resolved within the timeline of the rest of the story.
Something that I should admit, something that definitely colours my experience with the HEE, is that I tend to avoid pretty determinedly books that have kids in them. It's a matter of my own personal taste, certainly, and I know that there is a huge audience for those types of books and I'm sure they're great ones if they're what you're into, but they are distinctly not what I'm into. So, with that in mind, I don't think anyone is going to be surprised when an epilogue letting me know that the two characters from the story have made some adorable children and are super sexy in love parents does absolutely nothing for me. And, to be clear, the series of HEEs that have ended books I've read recently that inspired this post have almost all included the couple being sexy flirtatious with each other while their adorable children run around being adorable. And I'm sure that ovaries explode everywhere with the adorable sexy of it all, but... meh. I specifically choose books that don't go in that direction and it's frustrating to me when I get to the end of the book and end up with that anyway.
To me, it's boring. It doesn't add to the story and sometimes it straight up takes away from it.
As a reader, I prefer to have the ability to imagine where I think those characters would have ended up - or not think about it at all. For me, the story is the story, it should be encapsulated. And in a romance novel, the end should be the point when the falling in love part is over, the choice to be together has been made, and you know that what comes next is just life. To be fair, this isn't only true for romance novels for me - I absolutely loathe the epilogue to the Harry Potter series as well - but I do feel like romance novels tend to be the worst offenders because they tend to be the ones that lean incredibly heavy on the idea that a happy ending has to include marriage and babies and all of the things that we as women are supposed to want - which, for the record, many of us have absolutely not interest in. It's generic and rife with "supposed to", and for me it absolutely does take away from the story when so much of what I've been reading has ended basically exactly the same.
So, here's my plea to authors of the kind of books I like to read... Let the story end where the story ends, let the reader imagine a happily ever after the way that it looks for them or just not picture it at all. Or, even better, post the epilogue separately on your website as some kind of bonus content for those people who do love them, so that those of us who don't can just end the story happily and be done. I dunno, I get that this is probably a wildly unpopular opinion, but I still think it holds up.
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