The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (5 page)

And isn’t that in fact the
right
way to look at it, under modern conditions?
Don’t
we have plenty of time to just have fun, play the field, or even screw up our lives completely—and still recover and find happiness later? Can’t we enjoy male “admiration” to our frivolous hearts’ content ... or experience the perks of dating a high-status man (who doesn’t really take us seriously) ... or hang onto a guy we know isn’t really right for us, just for the time being, because we’re lonely or scared ... and still go on to find “permanent” bliss with the real love of our life later on? And anyway, aren’t a lot of the mistakes that Jane Austen’s unhappy women make actually errors forced by the constraints of their age—disasters that can’t happen to us because we have so much more time and freedom to maneuver in? Can’t we
afford
to let ourselves be distracted by other things that we want from men, sex, and love in the short term, and still end up living happily ever after?

Well, yes and no. Jane Austen certainly believes in learning from your mistakes. Almost every one of her heroines has a crucial moment when she realizes that she’s been managing her love life the wrong way. They make different mistakes, but they have similar moments when they recognize the errors they’ve fallen into. For Elizabeth Bennet, it’s Darcy’s letter that shows her how she’s let herself grossly underestimate his value (and exaggerate Wickham’s). For Catherine Morland, it’s when she sees she’s in danger of losing Henry Tilney’s respect by her wild imaginings about his father. For Emma, it’s only when she sees that her match-making schemes
have unconsciously encouraged Harriett to try for a match with Mr. Knightley that she realizes she loves Mr. Knightley herself. Fortunately, Jane Austen heroines are mostly able to recover from their mistakes and go on to find happiness in love.
¹⁶

The very same thing happens today. Women suddenly notice the qualities of a man they’ve overlooked, or they see through the jerk they’ve already given too much of themselves to. They realize they’re chasing the wrong things, they change course, they grow up. At last report, Jessica Cutler of “Washingtonienne” fame was married with a baby daughter. We can hope she’s changed her mind about “Love is not enough.”

But notice that Jane Austen’s heroines don’t find happy love by persisting in their mistakes. They get to their happy endings only by seeing that they’ve gone wrong somewhere, reviewing their “past conduct,” and
changing direction.
And that kind of change in direction isn’t by any means guaranteed. Not everybody in a Jane Austen novel who goes down the wrong road turns around and heads back in the right direction. Plenty of them just keep on going.

The force of habit is very strong. Strong enough to freeze us in the shapes we’ve twisted ourselves into in the pursuit of things that won’t ever make us really happy. That’s what Elizabeth Bennet is worried about when she tries to convince her father not to let Lydia go to the military camp at

Brighton.
¹⁷
The longer Lydia goes on chasing after the attention of men who don’t really care about her, the harder it’s going to be for her to do anything else: “Her character will be fixed, and she will, at sixteen, be the most determined flirt that ever made herself and her family ridiculous.”
¹⁸

Unfortunately, this kind of thing also still happens today—more often than the scenario where the woman realizes her mistake and recalibrates to aim for happiness after all.
¹⁹
The very elbow room we modern women have—that extra decade between the time we’re first interested in guys and the time it seems reasonable to think about a “permanent” relationship—can be a liability. Those are more years we have to become “fixed” in habits that make it harder for us to look for happiness in love. It’s not so easy, when you’ve spent your twenties pursuing attention, clinging to a guy because he’s your security blanket, or enjoying the status of the high rollers you date, to do a sudden turnaround and make happy love your aim.

For a modern example of the habit-forming pursuit of things other than happiness in love, read Hephzibah Anderson’s
Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year without Sex.
²⁰
Anderson broke up with her college boyfriend because “I’d fallen for another—my heart now belonged to boundless, inconstant possibilities.” She was starting out in an exciting London publishing career and let herself be carried away on a wave of “fun, giddy times.” And she acquired a love life to match. “On some deep-down level, I think I regarded my singleness as part of the deal. I told myself I was looking for something more meaningful, more lasting, yet I consistently chose entanglements with men who weren’t really available.” She spent her twenties collecting a host of self-deprecating stories
²¹
from relationships that either sputtered out after “a torrid few months” or never got going in the first place. By the time Anderson happened to run into that old college boyfriend—fortuitously when he was buying another girl an engagement ring at De Beers in New York—she realized he was the only man who had ever told her, “I love you.”
²²
And so she set off on a year without sex hoping she could change the dynamic she’d gotten stuck in.

And then, when her sex fast was over at the end of the year, instead of the fireworks she’d been expecting after “all those months, all those lessons supposedly learned,” she found herself once again having “awful” sex with a man who “felt like a stranger.” She was right back in the same old pattern. In the end she decided she
had
learned something, after all—“Getting into that situation suggested I’d made absolutely no progress, but my response showed just how much I had learned. I could tell the real thing from the fake, and from that point there was no going back.”
²³
So Hephzibah Anderson did manage, in the end, something like Jane Austen’s “serious reflection” and “self-knowledge.” But those extra years that started out with “boundless,
inconstant possibilities” didn’t make it any easier. That’s when she dug the rut that it took her a solid year of practicing the opposite to even begin to climb out of.

Jane Austen’s heroines need all their extraordinary wit, energy, and “delicacy of mind” for the pursuit of happiness. We can’t afford to aim any lower.