It's hard in any age for a writer to be original. "Happy ever after" is the longest-running and most-used plot in the human story, appearing in any story-telling medium from ancient fairy tales to many a television series. Man seeks woman, prince seeks princess, king seeks queen.
Royalty commands attention. To women, at least, there is no story more compelling than a prince seeking a bride; media empires have been founded on it, and continue to enrich themselves selling real and fictional royal weddings to commoners. Even anti-royalists pay it heed, as the object of their resistance. Whether applauded or scorned, royalty is not in danger of being ignored to death.
Therein lies our fascination with the doings of royals. Those born into the royal class live the life of a goldfish, exchanging privacy for privilege and learning hard lessons about trust. History is rank with the tales of princes and princesses who struggle to escape the aquarium, but find themselves always returned to their prison of glass walls. They either accept their habitat, submitted to duty or addiction, or knock themselves silly against the walls, but there is no life outside the goldfish bowl for a royal. More indelible than a tattoo, royalty cannot be erased or removed so long as history books and the media empires continue.
Those who marry into the royal class have the privilege of choosing their prison. Royal marriage is a dive into the goldfish bowl, to keep the other fish company and provide the commoners with entertainment. We have an insatiable appetite for princesses particularly, and expect a good show of pageantry, gems, and fine clothes. We want the bride. Princess candidates are examined minutely and judged on their taste and beauty, their fidelity, and their graciousness to the press. When a prince chooses his bride, the wedding contract of his princess includes an unwritten clause that transfers all rights to the public.
Why are we so compelled by these stories? The stories of kings and queens, princes and princesses are guaranteed sellers, from fairytales to animated films, and tabloids to documentaries. Even our faux-princesses of popular culture can sell more magazines in a week than our most powerful political and financial leaders could sell in a year. Mere power can scarcely retain our attention, unless the power is being used for evil. Judging by common cultural references, the subject of Adolf Hitler is as compelling as Princess Diana. So evil must be part of the story, as well.
A prince who seeks a bride, an evil villain, a quest, a beautiful princess who needs rescuing, self-sacrifice, a battle, a wedding: these are the enduring plotlines, told over and over again in legends, myths, folklore, literature, and film. Novels could not survive without them, and classics wouldn't be complete without them. It is the story we all know and crave, the story we are born to hear; more than that, it is the play in which we are players. We are viewers in the pageant of royalty, but we are also each the prince or princess in our hearts. We are in the story and on the journey.
From birth to death, our life is a journey in which we separate and come together many times over. We leave the bodies of our mothers and find ourselves terrifyingly alone; our cries of loneliness bring our parents to us, and we bond. We discover our independence and run away; our cries of pain bring our parents to us and we bond. Eventually we leave our parents and seek a mate; marriage itself is a cycle of separation and rejoining, and we begin the journey anew as parents. Like our fascination with royalty, the universal experiences of separation and union tell us about our story, about who we are and why we're here. The story goes like this:
Once upon a time, a prince desired a bride, a companion to love for eternity. An evil villain tempted away the bride, and the prince set out on a quest to win her back. Though she had hurt him and turned away from him, he loved her so much he was willing to die for her. In the battle for the princess, he did die, but in dying, he defeated the enemy and came back to life, and he married the princess. And they lived happily ever after.