Once upon a time, the marriage plot served the inevitable happy ending. What happens when the institution—and with it, the tidy narrative—slips out of fashion?
I never cared much for novels about relationships—at least not until the end of my own long-term one a few years ago. It was, in retrospect, a classic story. Girl meets boy at university. Boy, despite being able to quote Schopenhauer and rigorously read The Second Sex, dreams of the proverbial white picket fence. Girl panics. Girl is a Sagittarius. The story ends, as such stories do, in tears: the girl deciding she must ‘find herself’ (whatever that means). Which is to say, her story didn’t end at all. Part of that panic, I think, came from the way I’ve always viewed marriage: not as a beginning but a conclusion. I blame the novels I grew up on—and the marriage plot especially—which promised resolutions and order. These narratives had a predictable formula: a suitor (or sometimes two), a central obstacle—class, scandal, misunderstanding—a long, slow-burning will-they-or-won’t-they and, at last, the inevitable happily ever after.
Jane Austen, a progenitor of this structure as we know it, has long been both critiqued and commended, her novels providing fertile ground for critical conversations around gender, domesticity and class. As Sophie Gilbert highlights in the Atlantic, there’s a paradox in the author’s work: while her writing offers a subtle commentary on the rigid societal roles women are confined to, they also uphold the strictures of marriage as the ultimate prize for her intelligent, worthy heroines. But as women’s agency expanded, our endings—thankfully—stretched far beyond creating offspring with someone who only turns up for supper. (Austen herself, I’ll note, never married.) This shift is something a literary professor, Saunders, laments in Jeffrey Eugenides’ 2011 novel The Marriage Plot: ‘Marriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel.’ What Saunders—and by extension, Eugenides—is wrestling with is the idea that once marriage stopped being the defining resolution for women’s narratives, both the institution and narrative itself began to lose their grip.
I do think marriage—and with it, the marriage plot—has slipped out of fashion. Part of that might be personal. I grew up at an intersection: a household with traditional values, a culture offering more choice, and then, later, shelves of fiction that seemed less interested in celebrating marriage than in dismantling it. Such is the case in Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings. In the 2018 novel, Natsuki and her ‘husband’ go through the motions of marriage, not because they want to but because it is expected. They call society ‘the Factory’, a machine that treats people as interchangeable parts—trained, controlled, made to fit. ‘On Earth,’ Natsuki says, ‘young women were supposed to fall in love and have sex, and if they didn’t, they were “lonely” or “wasting their youth and would regret it later”’. Obviously, people still fall in love and write about falling in love—genre romance is big business—but novels like Murata’s tell a different story. The books I devoured post-breakup, for example, rarely ended with glittering rings, and honestly, I’d be hard-pressed to name one that did. When I asked a bookseller recently to recommend a selection of contemporary literary fiction that centered on romantic relationships, she waved across a wide swath of shelves: a novel about an innovative dating app, a queer dating guide, divorce fiction (not by Nora Ephron), books on heartbreak, parenthood, being single, and, of course, a good deal about capitalism. Yet when I asked specifically for novels featuring the marriage plot, she led me to the classics section.
Once marriage stopped being the defining resolution for women’s narratives, both the institution and narrative itself began to lose their grip.
Contemporary fiction’s take on modern dating sketches a new space, one without clear rules—it’s at once freeing and disorienting. Why? Part of the reason seems to be that our world has grown more complicated. Identity politics, climate change, pandemics, political upheaval, the proliferation of porn, hook-up culture, the #MeToo movement, dating fatigue—the list is long. Each has totally redefined how we connect—and, naturally, what we see reflected in our fiction. As Jennifer Pinkerton observes in Heartland, a 2022 collection of conversations, interviews and insights into modern dating in Australia, many people are forgoing traditional norms. ‘The mainstream model of love and connection is so overly dominant,’ she writes, ‘that flimsy idea of finding the one who will complete you and accept you always […] this representation blocks light from reaching alternative paths’.
One of Pinkerton’s conversations is with a thirty-four-year-old queer scientist from Canberra who lists the benefits of polyamory as one such detour from the status quo. It’s a narrative that’s gaining traction in recent years—ask anyone living in an inner-city queer-friendly suburb or scroll through your streaming services—though not a new one. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre had a famously open relationship, swinging was popularised in the 70s and The Ethical Slut, the bible of consensual non-monogamy, was published in the 90s. Still, if the success of Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020), Miranda July’s All Fours (2024) or Rochelle Siemienowicz’s Double Happiness (2024) is anything to go by, we’ll be reading more stories about tangled polycules and metamour brunches shortly—and I’m not mad about it (it’s juicy stuff).
Queer fiction is also having a moment. In these books—locally, Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip (2018), Claire Thomas’ The Performance (2021), Dylin Hardcastle’s A Language of Limbs (2024) come to mind—queerness is not so much a problem to navigate, a common literary trope, but a layered facet of lived experience. Upasna Barath explores these complexities in her 2025 novel, Comedic Timing, where Naina, an Indian American woman, faces the tricky task of dipping her toes back into the dating pool after a breakup with her long-term girlfriend. When she finds herself drawn to a man, David, she’s confronted with some uncomfortable questions: Is her attraction genuine or a performance of normative desire? Is she seeking male approval in a way that clashes with her queer identity? And what will her friends think? These questions reflect a much broader cultural shift, where topics once too taboo are now exactly what readers are craving. From asexuality to pansexuality, the varied, authentic ways people experience connection are shaping what we read.
Of course, within our capitalistic, patriarchal structures, heterosexual cis pairings are still the dominant force. But in contemporary Australian fiction, the spotlight often lands on the chaotic mess of dating apps and hook-up culture that have come to mediate interpersonal dynamics. In Jessie Tu’s A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing (2020), loneliness drives Jena to seek validation through a string of exploitative men; in Ella Baxter’s New Animal (2021), Amelia numbs her grief by hitting Tasmania’s BDSM clubs; and in Madeleine Gray’s Green Dot (2023), Hera tumbles into an affair with her older boss (a man in cargo shorts, no less). These books sit in a canon, often labelled ‘sad girl lit’, alongside international authors like Dolly Alderton, Ottessa Moshfegh and ultimate lit-it girl, Sally Rooney. The genre is, as some critics have noted, predominantly white and middle-class—the same demographic that drove the demand for the marriage-plot novels of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Legalised marriage has long been considered a bourgeois institution, one anthropologists suggest arose alongside the advent of agriculture to regulate property ownership and ensure inheritance. In a time of environmental collapse, seemingly endless wars and increasing class disparities—a future of uncertainties—it’s no wonder that the mainstream conception of marriage is transforming. Gone is the archetype of Mr Darcy—once considered a flawed but noble figure of masculinity (how exactly did he earn that £10,000 a year?). Prince Charming is not going to save you. Edward Cullen is not romantic, he’s creepy. And this disillusionment is not just a heterosexual thing—queer narratives feel it too, as in more recent popular novels like Andre Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed, which reveal relationships not as redemptive, but as fraught, transient and more often than not unfulfilling.
Gone is the archetype of Mr Darcy—once a flawed but noble figure of masculinity.
These stories feel like they’re smack-bang in the post-Rooney era of contemporary literature—zeitgeisty and wry—where romance is no longer associated with roses and garden strolls, but with, at best, suspicion. As Zadie Smith observed in 2003, ‘there is something about love that does not sit well with the literary academy […] suspicious of emotional sincerity unless it’s been steeped in irony, pain, or failure’. This notion of ‘seriousness’ persists within narratives on the existential malaise of modern dating, where character-driven plots, day-to-day realism and predictable romantic let-downs are par for the course. Forget happily ever after, we have new recognisable tropes—ones that reflect the complexities and disappointments of our times. There seems to be comfort in this—or at the very least, a sense of camaraderie in commiseration.
With that in mind: Being single has never felt like a more viable option—a fact that anyone who’s spent too long on Hinge can attest. Personally, I’m all for narratives that stray from the traditional romantic arc, where the real solace is in friendship, in creativity, in selfhood. After my break-up, I had an epiphany while crying in a darkened cinema watching the Norwegian coming-of-age film The Worst Person in the World. The protagonist, Julie (Renate Reinsve), spends her twenties wrestling with what she wants—romantically, professionally, emotionally—contemplating motherhood, relationships and a life that doesn’t fit into any clear script. In the final act (spoiler), Julie chooses to focus on her career. Contemporary authors—Elena Ferrante, Laura McPhee-Browne, Michelle de Kretser—are increasingly foregrounding this negotiation between intimacy and independence in a way that feels empowered, even as it remains full of uncertainty.
Nowhere is this growing sense of ambiguity in contemporary writing more apparent than in its ‘endings’, which stand in stark contrast to the tidy resolutions of the marriage plot, once constructed to uphold moral values. Writers are now re-jigging the possibilities in ways that trail ellipses truer to the ways relationships unfold in real life or by deliberately expanding definitions of what a relationship can be. In my book club’s discussion of Oisín McKenna’s 2024 novel Evenings and Weekends, which follows a cast of interconnected characters during a London heatwave, we coined the term ‘Intermezzo Ending’ to describe the novel’s conclusion (which I won’t spoil)—an ending we might not have seen coming without the rise of stories that explore our changing attitudes to sex, desire and intimacy. In saying this, I do wonder if these open-ended conclusions really resonate more deeply with readers. Do we crave stories that reflect the mean, messy complexities of real life, where certainty is elusive? Or, at the end of the day, do we still long for a fairytale ending?
I can’t be sure—even within myself. I’m not anti-happy ending; I want characters to find love (I’m a realist, not a sadist). Critic Bec Kavanagh gestures toward this contradiction in her review of Green Dot, noting that Gray’s protagonist is someone who ‘has come of age in a world where everyone knows better, but who longs for a picket fence happy ending nonetheless’. The novelist Brandon Taylor takes this further, arguing that the marriage narrative still haunts us:
Instead of will this virtuous young woman survive her series of trials and marry a rich guy who will make her life better of previous eras, the contemporary marriage plot is more a Beckettian exploration of ontologies: me am wife, he am man, what am wife, what am man, child hungry, capitalism big ouchie. Novels about wives and mothers in crisis and novels about young women trying to figure out if they want to become wives and mothers [are] still kind of a marriage plot because marriage looms like a harrowing specter in the distance.
But I am more hopeful about the diversity of experiences on offer. This tension—between the neatness of literary tradition and the growing breadth of romantic options, between scepticism and the yearning for transcendent connection—feels like an accurate snapshot of contemporary attitudes (there’s a reason why the dating apps still exist despite the almost unanimous criticism of their existence). It may also be that our idea of ‘happily ever after’ has changed, even if we’re not entirely sure what it looks like now. Literary fiction, then, reflects our collective uncertainty, our broadening choices, our shifting values. It offers a space where relationships can be unstable: at once tender, often disappointing, but always relatable. My feeling, after years of reading and a break-up or two (or three) is this: we haven’t abandoned love. We just no longer need (or want) it confined to a picket fence. Because as it turns out, the possibilities—in fiction, as in life—are endless.
