In the world of Bridgerton, the foundation of the happy ending for the main characters is, of course, a great and enduring love. Making the wrong choice of life partner seriously dents one’s chance of happiness.
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So far, we’ve focused on happiness as an enduring mental state. But there’s another sense of the word happiness that captures more than a psychological state. Philosophers call this “well-being.” Happiness as well-being refers to what benefits a person, is good for them, or makes them better off.
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I think Bridgerton rejects both hedonism and the desire-satisfaction theory. Consider that all three male leads are depicted in intimate situations with sex workers prior to marriage. These scenes are probably meant to display Simon’s, Anthony’s, and Colin’s virility and desirability, but they also demonstrate that mere physical pleasure is empty. What each male lead finds is that true happiness—not to mention the best sex of their lives— requires more than transient transactional relationships: it requires true love. Writing about romance novels in her book Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture, Catherine Roach notes that “In all cases, the characters’ commitment to each other and to the central value of love brings to their lives a sense of deep happiness, personal fulfillment, and the ongoing promise of hot sex…”
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The Bridgertons get it all: pleasure, the satisfaction of their desires, and a harmoniously ordered set of goods. The happily ever after is a life of virtuous activity, of meaning and purpose, of love and friendship of all kinds, of myriad pleasures, of beauty and wealth, of health, and, of course, of deep and abiding romantic love.
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We started this chapter with Julia Quinn’s assertion that everybody wants a happy ending. Aristotle famously said that the highest good for human beings is eudaimonia—happiness or well-being. Even Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who did his darndest to build an ethical system that had nothing to do with happiness, admitted that “happiness is necessarily the wish of every finite being.”[xiv] But contemporary philosopher Sara Ahmed poses some hard questions about this accepted wisdom. She asks us to notice the ways that societal definitions of happiness create “happiness scripts” that maintain injustices and narrow horizons, forcing people onto paths that are wrong for them, and punishing those who deviate.
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