No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny Purmort

your story is always so much more than just sad. And your happy stories are more than just happy. Obviously, everything is more complicated than it appears on Instagram. But it is incredibly difficult to live with complicated. It is even more difficult for other people to deal with complicated.

Life is flexible and has long legs and a million different ways to kick you right in the chops. We lose the ones we love, but we also lose friends, jobs, and our sense of self. And then, we get to assemble something new from whatever is left behind.

This is life after life after life, in all of the chaos and contradiction of feelings and doings and beings involved. There will be unimaginable joy and incomprehensible tragedy. There will be endings. But there will be no happy endings.

Even if they’re often heavy and unwieldy, our past lives are not baggage. They are not defects; they are features. Our past experiences—especially the hard ones—help us navigate the world around us and ahead of us.

I wish I could tell my teenage self that loving once makes you better at loving, and better at being loved. That whatever happens with each love, you can carry it all proudly.

A spoiler may ruin the surprise, but it can’t save you from the shock, and it can’t prepare you for what’s next. What’s next is unknowable, but one thing is certain: it doesn’t care about what you want, or what you’re expecting.

“Just don’t date anyone funnier than me,” he said. “Or who wears sweatpants. Or cargo pants. Don’t date any boring dads.”

I can do all of this on my own. But I don’t have to. I don’t need him, but I choose him. Happily.

You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to. That’s what your heart is there for.

For a long time, love felt like something that I had to earn, that could be taken from me at any time for bad behavior. It felt like just above my head there was a gauge that only I could sense. The gauge measured how much love I received from the people around me. If I was good, more love poured in, and the gauge moved up. If I was bad, the love poured out, the gauge went down. Love was subject to change, based on my behavior. The better I was, the more I got: from God, my parents, my siblings, my friends. It felt like any love I didn’t get went to someone else, someone who deserved it more.