A new essay published by The Daily Wire argues that the entertainment industry’s move away from marriage-centered endings for female characters is doing real cultural damage — and that bringing back “happily ever after” could help reverse it.
In the piece, writer Elizabeth Grace Matthew frames her critique around a seasonal ritual: rewatching the 1998 romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail” each fall. The film, she writes, is a “timeless rom-com in the way that matters most”: both leads have to grow and change before the relationship can work. That kind of arc, she contends, has largely vanished from screens.
Matthew acknowledges why the shift happened. Many older marriage-driven stories, she writes, featured thin female characters whose growth was secondary to the wedding finale — and the pop culture of her 1990s and 2000s childhood traded in a superficial brand of female empowerment that often amounted to boy-craziness. She points to “The Little Mermaid,” her favorite movie as a preschooler, as an example she now struggles to defend: Ariel’s pursuit of Eric, in her reading, involves no meaningful maturation or regard for others. “Sex and the City” gets similar treatment, with protagonist Carrie Bradshaw sleeping around, ditching a good partner for a bad one, and still landing her eventual husband.
By the 2010s, Matthew writes, media for girls and women rightly moved away from those “girl gets boy, which is all she cares about” plots. The problem is what replaced them: stories in which romance is absent altogether rather than integrated into a broader coming-of-age.
The ‘Collectivist Yesterday’ Critique
Her sharpest examples come from Disney. Mirabel in “Encanto” and the title character of “Moana,” she writes, chase self-actualization tied to their ancestors’ troubled histories rather than self-development aimed at a brighter personal future. She places the protagonists of HBO’s “Girls” and the upcoming “Forgotten Island” in the same category.
Matthew asks whether that’s the model parents should want for their daughters — or themselves: fixating on some aspect of a “collectivist yesterday” rather than one’s own tomorrows, and remaining indefinitely uncoupled. She says it isn’t what she wants for her sons either.
The essay concedes that broadening women’s media beyond the marriage plot was good and necessary. Women deserve portrayals that reflect womanhood in its wholeness, which includes more than marriage, she writes. But that wholeness, in her argument, includes marriage too — and in pushing away from marriage-as-everything, the culture has abandoned its centrality altogether.
A Statistic at the Center of the Argument
Matthew cites polling data showing that only 61% of 12th-grade girls in the United States say they are likely to marry someday. She allows that marriage rates are falling and that young men in that cohort face “all kinds of problems,” but argues these girls are also absorbing the norms — or the absence of norms — from the media they consume.
“Happily ever after” was never a guarantee, she writes, but until recently it was a near-universal aspiration. By making women’s media about something other than “just” marriage, she argues, the culture threw “the proverbial baby out with the bath water.”
Her proposed alternative isn’t a return to flimsy fairy tales. Matthew points to Jane Austen’s “Emma,” Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” and Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog” as stories that take female formation seriously while still building toward love. Depictions of women who pursue both individual growth and lasting partnership, she writes, are “holistic and aspirational” rather than sexist or reductive — a suitable marriage as the most important thing, but not the only thing, young people should aim for.
“Character development and romantic success are not opposites, but complements,” Matthew writes, adding that producing years of “ditzy, uneven marriage plots” doesn’t mean better, more egalitarian ones are impossible.
The column closes on the hope that life might imitate art — that a revived taste for well-earned happy endings could re-enchant what Matthew calls a love-starved culture.
The essay appears as part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s culture and lifestyle vertical. Matthew writes about books, education and culture, including on Substack.
The piece arrives amid a broader, ongoing debate on the right and in mainstream culture over falling marriage rates, declining birth rates and the role of entertainment in shaping young people’s expectations about family formation. Critics of that argument have long countered that economic pressures, shifting gender dynamics and the growing social acceptance of single life are likelier drivers than what shows up in movies — and that marriage-focused plots of the past often reinforced narrow roles for women. Matthew’s essay attempts to thread that needle, arguing that the pendulum swung from a shallow fixation on romance to a fashionable indifference toward it, and that neither serves women well.
Whether Hollywood has any appetite for the reversal she proposes is another question. Recent family films and prestige television have leaned heavily into self-discovery, friendship and chosen family as endpoints rather than romance — a trend that shows few signs of slowing. For now, the essay stands as one writer’s case that the fairy tale ending deserves another act.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-new-fairy-tale-has-a-pretty-depressing-plot-twist