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I’ve always been a hopeless romantic.

Growing up on fairytales and the promise of a ‘Happy Ever After’ tends to do that to a three-year-old girl. While I have those to thank, my hopeless romantic self was shaped by the one story I got to witness every day.

The love my parents shared and how it began.

My parents’ love story is one that you have probably heard a million times before. He was the bad boy, she was the good girl, and both were pretty much on two different sides of the world—at least in high school terms.

But of course, no matter how far off each other’s radar they were, one could never escape the power of ‘being partnered up’.

You guessed it, they got partnered up for a class assignment in high school. And just like every single time you have seen this story played out, they got together and lived happily ever after.

But does one ever question, what happens post the happily-ever-after?

In the case of my parents, they did live the life expected of a couple formed from a high school cliché.

Each morning, as far back as I can remember, my parents, my sister, and I would gather around at the dining table for breakfast, and no matter how rushed or how late to work my dad was, he never left without kissing my mom goodbye.

Every Friday after work, he would always bring a bouquet of flowers for her to put in a vase for the dining table—celebrating the end of a work week and the beginning of spending quality time with the family for the weekend.

But as time went by, these little occasions were getting rarer. The time between one kiss to the next was getting longer and the flowers were starting to wilt, because there weren’t new ones to replace them with.

And, ultimately, my parents’ love story ended on a day I remember vividly.

The day my parents sat me and my sister down at the dining table, sitting across from us with gloomy expressions on both of their faces.

The same dining table that was used to display their love for each other was now tainted and overshadowed by the memory of that one day. It mocked me of everything the table had once meant, when that one word was uttered.

A word that was spoken only once and yet it kept repeating in my eight-year-old mind.

Divorce.

My parents were getting a divorce.

‘Do you not love us any more?’ my then fourteen-year-old sister, Eliza, had asked as her eyes started to fill with tears.

‘Of course we do,’ my mom answered as she reached out her hands, clasping them with Eliza’s. ‘And we will always be there for the two of you, no matter what.’

‘Then why can’t you be there for us together? Do you not love each other any more?’ I voiced out, grabbing both my parents’ attention as I said my first words since they delivered the news to us.

They both looked at each other for a moment, not knowing how to answer my question.

‘We just think it’s best for us to go our separate ways,’ my dad then said, looking into my eyes, as if he was willing me to understand he would’ve spared us this pain had there been a better way.

But the damage was already done.

That was strike one.

While my parents’ divorce had ruined my views of love and wants for a ‘Happy Ever After’ with my own cliché love interest, the bruise slowly started to fade when my sister introduced Nathan to the family.

It eventually disappeared on the day Eliza called me on Facetime, telling me that Nathan got down on one knee and popped the question, asking her to spend the rest of their lives together.

With tears streaming down her face as Eliza tried her best to recount the story of how he proposed—a customized crossword puzzle was involved—through her sobs of happiness, I started to believe that maybe ‘Happy Ever After’ did exist for love stories with cliché love interests.

Being the ambitious woman she was—and still is—Eliza steered clear of any romantic entanglements until she graduated college.

At her first job of being a journalist as a fresh graduate, Eliza was hired alongside Nathan—another graduate who was equally motivated to prove his worth to extend their stay at the company, making them natural work rivals.

And just like déjà vu, they were partnered up to work on an article together. Long story short, spending more time together led them to discover that they had more similarities than they thought, both in their way of thinking and big career goals.

They ended up submitting one of the best stories the organization had ever received.

Nathan proposed just over a year after they officially got together. Their families and friends surrounded them at their engagement party, joining them in celebration on their road to happily-ever-after.

But of course, real life had other plans. It came as a phone call I received from my sister.

‘Hey, little sis. Are Mom and Dad there with you?’ my sister had asked, her voice shaky as if she had been crying. It was a Friday night, and I was catching my parents up on my week. Dad usually came over to have dinner with us whenever he could, but Fridays were a constant.

‘Yeah, they’re here,’ I told her. ‘Is everything okay?’

The line was silent for a moment, and I was starting to get worried. ‘Eliza?’ I called out.

‘Can you put me on speaker please?’ Eliza answered instead.

I placed the phone in the middle of the kitchen island as Eliza started explaining why she was calling.

Eliza and Nathan were planning to move to New York City once they got married, living out their lives as journalists in ‘The Big Apple’ together.

But while that was Eliza’s ultimate goal, Nathan didn’t share it so much.

The downfall came when he got another job offer, the one he had been dreaming of.

The setback?

It was all the way in San Francisco.

The other side of the country.

It left Eliza and Nathan with a very difficult decision to make.

They tried compromising on things—making plans to visit each other, prolonging their engagement.

But ultimately, they didn’t want to hold the other person back, not when they both perfectly understood the price they had each paid—the time and effort they’d put in, the sacrifices they had made—in hopes of having their dream offer to finally be within their reach.

In the end, they decided to break off the engagement, just three months later.

It was sad to think how their biggest similarity with one another—the one that had brought them together—would also be the one to rip them apart.

And that was strike two.

For a long time, I wondered if there truly was such a thing as ‘happily ever after’, or if that was just a concept created to give hope. Maybe love stories with cliché love interests weren’t meant to last after all; maybe they were just meant for stories, a thing of fiction.

Or at the very least, they weren’t meant to last for my family. I had enough proof to believe in that.

‘Happy Ever After’ is a part of fairytales, but we tend to forget that curses exist in the same stories too.

What if my family was cursed to have doomed relationships because of who they choose to be with?

Seeing it happen once had already convinced me of the curse, but watching it repeat made it harder to ignore.

And what if the only way to prevent this from happening to me was to avoid these cliché love interests from entering my life?

If that’s the case, then I’ll just have to make sure I won’t be struck out.