The essay below appears as Chapter 5 of Bridgerton and Philosophy, edited by Jessica Miller.

“I shall be very happy, indeed.”: Understanding Happily Ever After

Jessica Miller

Viewers love Bridgerton for many reasons—its visual allure, fantasy Regency setting, dramatic plots, swoony romance, and, of course, the inimitable Lady Whistledown—but foremost among those is the promise of a happy ending. The show puts Simon and Daphne, Kate and Anthony, and Penelope and Colin through hell—Childhood trauma! Head wounds! Secret identities!—but it doesn’t leave them there. They all reach their “happily ever after” by season’s end. Since Bridgerton is based on Julia Quinn’s historical romance novels, the happy endings are no surprise: if there’s one thing readers of romance expect, it’s a “happily ever after.” As Quinn herself says, “Romance novels are all about the happy ending. And the truth is that’s what we all want in life. Isn’t the human quest the happy ending?”[i]

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, which is why Anthony Bridgerton tries to quash his mother’s attempt to pair his sister Daphne with the Duke of Hastings by telling her, “He will not make her happy!” Just like Anthony, doting older sibling Kate Sharma wishes “to steer my sister to the greatest possible happiness.” Matriarch Violet Bridgerton is perhaps the strongest cheerleader for the happiness that can be found in romantic love, telling Benedict in book 3 of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series, “‘Of course I have great ambition that my children marry well and happily … I would allow my children to marry paupers if it would bring them happiness.’ Benedict raised a brow. ‘They would be well-principled and hardworking paupers, of course,’ Violet explained. ‘No gamblers need apply.’”[ii]

But is true love all that matters for happiness? Violet’s comment about gamblers suggests that we need more than romantic love to be happy. Perhaps immoral behavior itself (gambling, by Violet’s lights) dents happiness? Or perhaps the bad consequences of such behavior (economic precarity and even premature death, if Lord Featherington’s story tells us anything) impacts happiness? When Daphne insists to a skeptical Simon that “I shall be very happy, indeed” to marry Prince Friedrich, is she lying to him or to herself? Perhaps she has a different definition of happiness than he does. Which leads us to ask, what is happiness, anyway?

“There is nothing in the world that makes me happier than being with you.”

When Penelope tells Colin that nothing makes her happier than being with him, what exactly does she mean? Happiness seems to be more than the fleeting positive feeling that Prince Friedrich refers to when he observes that “I am happy for them. Everyone is happy for them.” regarding Daphne’s engagement to Simon. The “happiness” in the “happy ending,” is not a transient feeling, but a broad and lasting state of mind. So what exactly does this state of mind entail?

Hedonists say that happiness is simply a balance of pleasant over unpleasant experiences. Hedonism has a long history in philosophy—the word “hedonism” comes from the Greek word for “pleasure.” But critics have pointed out that we can have intense pleasures—think of Simon licking that ice cream cone, or of Colin’s threesomes—that don’t move the needle on how happy we are overall. Another issue with hedonism is that someone can have a balance of pleasant over unpleasant experiences but still have an underlying negative emotional condition. A person struggling with grief might go to work, laugh, and seem to experience genuine pleasure most of the time, but “deep down” they are not really happy, and a reminder of their loved one can easily destroy their good cheer.

Contemporary philosopher Daniel Haybron agrees with hedonists that happiness is some kind of affective state or feeling, but not merely pleasure. Rather, it’s an overall emotional condition that has three aspects: endorsement, engagement, and attunement.[iii] Endorsement refers to the burst of joy we feel when we experience positive events. Think of the joy on Simon and Daphne’s faces when they hold their newborn son for the first time, or Kate’s sheer delight when Anthony declares his love in the garden at the Featherington Ball.

The second dimension of happiness, engagement, refers to how we affirm our lives: are we interested and present? Or are we bored, absent, and withdrawn? Engagement can refer to a kind of vitality or passion, of the sort that an opera singer like Siena Rosso or a modiste like Genevieve Delacroix bring to their craft. Engagement can also refer to that feeling of “flow” when we are wholly invested in something. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934-2021) described this sense of deep engagement and connection with ourselves and our environment as a major component of happiness.[iv] An oft-cited example of flow is sports, as when Anthony and Kate race across the park on horseback, but flow can occur in all aspects of our lives. Penelope is in a state of flow when she is writing her Lady Whistledown Society Papers, as is Francesca when she plays the pianoforte with such focus that her mother has to shout to get her attention. Engagement also captures the feeling of being challenged or frustrated as we try to reach our goals. Though this is not pleasant, it can be a part of our happiness.

We can see the importance of engagement when we consider the character of Marina from Quinn’s To Sir Phillip, With Love. Marina suffered from depression after the birth of her child, withdrawing from her family and friends. Her husband Phillip describes the pain of “watching the life behind her eyes slip away, day by day, until all that was left was an eerie flatness.”[v] In a less dramatic example from the show, Eloise Bridgerton is uninterested in the usual debutante pursuits, merely going through the motions to please her mother. She yearns for engagement, lamenting that “I find myself, yet again, swinging to and fro, not moving in any particular direction.”

Then there is attunement, which is a confident, carefree inner calm. Someone who is in attunement isn’t experiencing chronic stress, insecurity, or anxiety. Portia Featherington is someone who does not seem to be in attunement. She deals with one stressor after another: her husband’s gambling debts, his heir’s fraudulent schemes, her ward’s pregnancy out of wedlock, and her two older daughters’ general ineptitude. Always hustling, never able to rest, Portia is never comfortably at home in her own life. Daphne in season two provides a striking contrast: happily married, a mother, and a fine hostess, she is completely at ease, advising Edwina Sharma that “there is no greater pleasure than enjoying your home alone with your family. With your husband, as long as you choose the right one.”

A third theory of happiness is different from hedonism and the emotional engagement theory, because it denies that happiness is about an affective state at all. The life satisfaction theory says that a person is happy when they have a favorable attitude towards their own life.[vi] People who are happy on this account are not merely having positive feelings: they have a favorable judgment about their life as a whole. The basic idea is that one’s happiness should reflect one’s authentic response to a life that is one’s own, measured by one’s goals and aspirations. A tortured artist or brilliant researcher might be quite satisfied with their life, and thus happy, even if it doesn’t include a lot of pleasure. This theory has several things going for it: it makes happiness more than a matter of pleasure, it makes you the authority, and, finally, it takes your whole life into consideration.

Of course, there are drawbacks to this view.[vii] For one thing, psychologists have found that people’s overall life satisfaction at any given time can be heavily influenced by transient factors like the weather.[viii] But if your life doesn’t substantially change when it rains, why should your satisfaction with it change? For another, people can be satisfied with their lives overall, yet report feeling unhappy or depressed nonetheless. Moreover, people don’t often take stock of their lives, unless forced to by something dramatic, like a terminal diagnosis. And how does one determine how satisfied they are overall, anyway? Anyone who has ever filled out one of those “wheel of life” tools with categories like “finances,” “health,” and “friends and family” knows that people are more satisfied in some areas and less so in others. Think of Violet Bridgerton, so happy as a doting mother and grandmother and as a leader of the ton, but who also laments a lack of romantic love, and who longs for a man to “tend her garden.” Finally, there are factors that impact our attitudes about life satisfaction that seem to have nothing to do with happiness. For example, on a day we are feeling grateful we might have high life satisfaction but, on a day when we are worried about complacency and getting stuck, our sense of satisfaction with our lives might be lower.

Bridgerton gives us examples of all three kinds of happiness. It depicts lots of different kinds of hedonistic pleasures—physical pleasures like sex, eating and drinking, dancing, fencing, horseback riding, boxing, and also more intellectual pleasures like playing and hearing music, poetry, reading novels, writing letters, and of course, penning one very influential gossip column. It also features characters performing a kind of “life satisfaction assessment,” reflecting on their lives in order to improve them: Eloise and Benedict’s heartfelt conversations on the swings, for example, or Colin’s rejection of his playboy persona. Finally, Haybron’s notion of happiness as emotional engagement seems to best capture the sense of pleasantness, vitality, and equanimity that the main characters achieve when they resolve their personal issues and settle down with their true loves.

“I am certain you will find your purpose one day. Everyone must eventually.”

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. If you are high in well-being then you are doing well, fortunate, or in an enviable condition. To say someone is happy in this sense is not just to describe them—it is to make a value judgment.

A good way to grasp the difference between well-being and the other three accounts of happiness is to consider a person who is badly mistaken about his own life. He thinks he is competent at his job, but in fact he’s a disaster whom none of his coworkers respects; he thinks his spouse loves him, but she is bitter and unfaithful; he believes he has real friends, but they merely tolerate him and criticize him behind his back. He feels happy, but most of us would deny he has a high level of well-being, that is, that his life is going well for him.

There are three main theories of what well-being consists in, hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories. Hedonism as a theory of well-being just means that what is good for me is just what feels good to me. Well-being consists in the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. Just like the hedonistic account of happiness, the hedonistic account of well-being is intuitively appealing: we do really seek pleasure and avoid pain. And there’s something commonsensical about the idea that something can benefit me only if I actually enjoy it. But there seems to be something missing. For one thing, there are some pleasures, like the pleasure Cressida Cowper gets in bullying Penelope, that we might want to exclude, but the theory doesn’t give us a way to do that. Another objection comes from Robert Nozick’s (1938-2002) famous thought experiment. Nozick described an “experience machine” that could simulate any pleasurable experience a person could desire. Once plugged in, the machine could be programmed to give you exactly the same experiences as someone who, say, climbed Mount Everest, or fell in love, or published their memoir. More recent examples of this kind thought experiment appear in late-twentieth-century films like The Truman Show and The Matrix. Nozick thinks most people would decline to enter the machine, and that this shows that well-being requires more than positive subjective experiences.[ix]

There’s no experience machine in Bridgerton, but there are cases of pleasure based on deception that support Nozick’s point. Edwina Sharma truly believes that Anthony Bridgerton wants to marry her, but the audience knows he is falling in love with her sister, Kate. Benedict Bridgerton believes that he earned his place at the Royal Academy of Art, but in fact his brother Anthony paid for his spot. Edwina’s and Benedict’s happiness vanishes upon learning the truth, and they would both probably say that their well-being was not enhanced by their false beliefs, even if it felt good to hold them. This seems to affirm Nozick’s point that if reality is intrinsically valuable, theories of well-being that only care about how experiences feel “from the inside” are false.

The second theory of well-being, the desire satisfaction theory, says that well-being consists in getting what you want. This theory has the advantage of being immune to “experience machine” type objections: the person in such a machine doesn’t have well-being because none of their desires are actually being fulfilled. But other questions have been raised. For example, what if a person desires something that isn’t good for them? Simon desires to not have children simply to spite his abusive father, and Anthony desires a respectful but loveless marriage to avoid causing or experiencing the pain of loss. But those desires seriously stunt both men’s ability to engage in fulfilling romantic relationships, and their character arcs bend towards jettisoning those bad desires. Another problem is stunted or impoverished desires. In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls’ (1921-2002) asked readers to imagine a brilliant mathematician who desires only to count blades of grass on Harvard’s lawn all day, every day.[x] Her desires are fulfilled, but is this life really good for her?

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…”[xi]

Of course, desire-theorists have offered all kinds of subtleties and refinements meant to dodge various objections, for example, that the only desires that count are informed desires or long-term desires, or rational desires, but one difficult question remains for all versions: does the fact that we desire something make it good for us, or is it, rather, that we desire it because it is good for us? This latter view gets us to the third theory of well-being, “objective list” accounts, which list items that make up your well-being even if you don’t find them pleasurable or want them. What is Bridgerton’s objective list? Looking at those happy endings again, what do all three couple possess? Deep, enduring romantic love, leading to marriage and children. Caring relationships with family and friends. Wealth and beauty. Pleasure of various kinds. Good health. Virtue, moral goodness. A sense of purpose and attunement.

If you ask a person on the street what their well-being consists in, they are likely to give you a list that includes a lot of the things listed above. Think again of those “wheel of life” diagrams with eight or nine categories that are so popular with life coaches. Objective list theories thus avoid the problem that hedonism has in defending the counter-intuitive notion that there is one and only one non-instrumental good: pleasure. While most people agree that pleasure is one component of well-being, they would hesitate to name it the only one. An objective list also avoids the problem of desire-fulfillment theories, that too many things would have to be included (think of Jack Featherington’s desire to swindle the ton by selling fake jewels, or Nigel Berbrooke’s desire to force Daphne Bridgerton into marriage, or Cressida Cowper’s desire to take credit for writing Lady Whistledown’s Society Papers). But an objective list can feel elitist or arbitrary: who decides what’s on it, and how?

To avoid this arbitrariness, we can look for an explanation for why something gets put on the list. This leads us to another type of objective theory, Aristotle’s (384-322 BCE) account of well-being, according to which the cultivation of virtue is the foundation for eudaimonia, translated as happiness, living well, or flourishing. Lives in which we fully exercise our human capacities, and actively pursue a rich, full existence, are the best lives we can lead, and the most pleasant.

Aristotle’s account is based on his ideas about human nature and the capacities that nature affords us. As human beings, we have capacities for distinctively human excellences, especially being morally and intellectually virtuous. Being just, being a good friend, being patient, generous, and courageous, are a few of the ways we can have an excellent moral character. Being practically wise—making good, sensible decisions that enhance well-being for ourselves, our loved ones, and our larger community—is a key intellectual virtue. On this account of well-being, exercising our capacities to their fullest is what we are meant to do. If we fulfill our natures, if we can manage to be really excellent at being human, we will have the best life possible.[xii]

The Bridgerton family offers ample instances of moral virtue. When Marina Thompson is pregnant with no word from her soldier lover, Daphne generously uses her connections as a new duchess to track down his whereabouts. Colin Bridgerton acts justly when he exposes Jack Featherington’s schemes and displays true friendship when he volunteers to help Penelope Featherington attract a suitor. Moral vice is generally left to other characters, like swindling Jack Featherington, bullying Cressida Cowper, and callous brute Nigel Berbrooke.

If well-being consists in a number of different goods, like pleasure, friendship, and moral virtue, then we need the ability to figure out how they can fit together in our lives, especially when they may seem to be in tension. As Lady Whistledown writes, “when heart and head are in conflict, every choice may feel like agony.” When Anthony decides that the way to avoid heartbreak is to avoid marrying for love, or when he buys Benedict’s way into art school, he means well, but he is not being smart: in trying to avoid heartbreak, he is causing even more of it, and in trying to help Benedict, he is failing to respect him. Anthony’s wrong choices show that we can have a general understanding of eudaimonia, but we also must be able to see, in any given situation, which course of action is best. With practice we gain deliberative, emotional, and social skills to figure out how to act in ways that make the best sense for each occasion.

Aristotle called this practical wisdom. It’s the ability to know what a specific virtue requires in a given moment. Violet Bridgerton is a wise and loving mother. Sometimes guiding her children requires directness, as when she scolds her headstrong eldest son, Anthony, for avoiding marriage while keeping a mistress in an apartment on the other side of town: “You like to speak of responsibility. My dear son. Of duty. Pray tell, what should you know of it?” Or when she responds to Anthony’s ridiculous statement that “I am looking for perfection” in a wife with a dire warning that “You will end up alone with such expectations.” But she guides Colin, her more sensitive son, much more gently. Violet well knows that when Colin asks about friendship as a foundation for marriage, he has Penelope in mind, but instead of telling him what to do, she reminds him that his own father “gathered the courage to ask.” Later, she casually mentions, “I hear Penelope might be getting a proposal tonight” and hopes it has the desired effect (it most definitely does).

One of the more controversial aspects of eudaimonistic theories of well-being—if 21^st century folks can get past the idea that human beings have a nature which is meant to be fulfilled with a life of virtuous activity, that is!— is the recognition that we do need certain things to go our way to live our best lives. It’s hard to exercise the virtue of charity, for example, if, like folks in the poor part of London to which Portia drags a pregnant Marina, one is working ninety hours a week for a barely survivable wage. It’s also more challenging to live the kind of fully active life, exercising one’s human capacities to the fullest, with a very severe disability.[xiii] Being raised by a good family, having good looks, good health, and enough wealth are mostly out of a person’s control, but they all, from a eudaimonistic perspective, impact one’s well-being. The Bridgertons—rich, beautiful, talented, powerful, and respected—are shining examples of how good fortune can enhance well-being. When Violet tells Daphne “You are a Bridgerton—you can do anything” …

Unlike the Bridgerton clan, who were raised in an atmosphere of love and mutual respect, Penelope Featherington had a bit of bad moral luck in being born into the Featherington family, with a neglectful, selfish, father, an uncaring and abusive mother, and cruel older sisters who relentlessly bullied her. Perhaps it was this bad moral luck that led Penelope to behave in decidedly unvirtuous ways throughout the series: lying and then publicly shaming her very best friend, Eliose, publicly humiliating her cousin Marina, and, as she admits when she comes clean about her secret identity as Lady Whistledown, being “careless” with her writing, and “cast[ing] aspersions from the shadows,” aspersions that hurt not only the Bridgertons but many others in the ton.

For Aristotle, there is no need to choose between happiness, in the sense of feeling subjectively good, and well-being, in the sense of having a life that goes well, because once we truly understand the kind of beings that we are, and what an excellent human life involves, we will find great pleasure in living it. Simon initially refused marriage and children. Anthony wanted to avoid, not marriage per se, but romantic love. Kate was determined to return to India and become a governess. Penelope wanted to maintain her secret identity as Lady Whistledown. Colin wanted to find his purpose in being useful to others. All of these desires were problematic in different ways, and they went unfulfilled, but only because they were replaced—typically through the miracle of true love, as these are romances, after all—by more healthy and mature desires that really did lead to both happiness and well-being. 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.

“We are not all guaranteed a fairy-tale ending.”

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. Marina Thompson, quoted at the start of this section, deviated from societal norms by having sex prior to marriage, and had to give up true happiness as “a world of fantasy.” Henry Granville is in love with Lord Wetherby, but must live unhappily as a heterosexual married man, telling Benedict: “We live under constant threat of danger. I risk my life every day for love….” Even Violet Bridgerton doesn’t seem to take Eloise’s concerns about the marriage mart and the role of women in Regency society seriously, telling her, “What you must find, my dear, is happiness. Penelope, assist me here. Eloise could find that with someone else, could she not?” Rejecting the idea that there is an objective account of happiness free from societal influences, Ahmed writes that, “Where we find happiness teaches us what we value rather than simply what is of value.”[xv]

In asking about the costs of happiness, what happiness makes invisible, and who is excluded from it, Ahmed takes on some tough questions that Bridgerton, as a romantic fantasy, tends to dodge. This raises expectations for the show’s first sapphic romance, between Francesca Bridgerton and Michaela Stirling. Showrunner Jess Brownell has promised, “it’s very important to me that in this world of happily ever afters that we are able to see a queer happily ever after and not let it be queer trauma.”[xvi] For Simon and Daphne, Kate and Anthony, and Penelope and Colin, romantic love is the centerpiece of a life of happiness and well-being. Of course, those are not the only visions of happiness that Bridgerton presents. We haven’t had a chance to investigate the happiness of other characters, like Lady Danbury, Violet Bridgerton, and Lady Tilley Arnold, all widows who live rich, full lives without romantic love. As Lady Danbury says, “A life of independence is no mere consolation. Indeed, many would think it the better prize,” declaring “My life is a life of joy.” How lucky for us, then, that there are eight siblings in the “shockingly prolific”—in Lady Whistledown’s memorable description—family, and, hopefully, many more seasons to bask in the various forms of thehappily ever after th

---

[i] Julia Quinn, “‘Bridgerton’ Author Julia Quinn Says We Could All Use a Little More Romance,” Netflix, March 25, 2022, at https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/bridgerton-author-julia-quinn-on-the-importance-of-romance-novels.

[ii] Julia Quinn, An Offer from a Gentleman, Digital ed. (New York: Avon Books, 2015), Ch. 4.

[iii] See Daniel M. Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-being (Oxford University Press, 2008), especially Ch. 6.

[iv] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness (Random House, 2013).

[v] Julia Quinn, To Sir Phillip, With Love, Digital ed. (New York: Avon Books, 2017), Ch. 4.

[vi] See L. W. Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Robert F. Almeder, Human Happiness and Morality (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Press, 2000).

[vii] For a comprehensive discussion of these criticisms, see Haybron, Ch 5.

[viii] For an overview of this and related issues, see Ed Diener, Richard E. Lucas, and Oishi Shigehiro, “Advances and Open questions in the Science of Subjective Well-Being,” Collabra: Psychology 4 (2018), page #s

[ix] Robert Nozick in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 43.

[x] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971), 432.

[xi] Catherine Roach, Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016), 166.

[xii] For an overview of Aristotle’s account of eudaimonia, see Richard Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/aristotle-ethics/, which includes an expansive bibliography.

[xiii] But see Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) for a compelling argument that being disabled is a way of being a social minority and not a way of being intrinsically worse off.

[xiv] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, Trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (New York: Dover Publications, 2014), 24.

[xv] Sara Ahmed, The Pursuit of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 13.

[xvi] Cate Campione, “‘Bridgerton’ Showrunner Jess Brownell Talks Season 3 Finale & The Surprising Twist To Francesca’s Love Story,” Deadline, June 13, 2024, at https://deadline.com/2024/06/bridgerton-season-3-finale-jess-brownell-francesca-gender-bend-1235971587/.