Happily ever after?

I like to watch chick flicks, and with few exceptions, chick flicks end with the assumption that the man and woman who just fell in love will live happily ever after. I was thinking about that this week and conjecturing why that is. Real life often tells a different story - they were happy for a time, but then they started to fight all the time and got a divorce, repeat as desired with a new person. I think that we (speaking in a strictly secular sense) like happily ever after stories because it gives us a glimmer of hope that we will find that rare relationship that lasts for a lifetime or shows resolution to problems that we wish we could resolve. Usually the exceptions are tragedies where the man and woman are kept apart by forces beyond their control (like a death, for example). Yesterday I saw a movie that had all of the elements of a happily ever after story, except that it was based on a true story. A marine goes to a foreign base and falls in love with a girl there. She can't leave the country without a little help, so they do some illegal things to get her out, then she has to go through the ordeal of getting asylum in the US. They get married in Vegas as soon as they can and finally come through all of the trials so they can be together (he gets demoted as low as he can as a result of his actions). Then the words on the screen come up and say that she was granted residency, followed by more words saying that they filed for divorce 5 years and one day after they got married. They went through all of that for a 5-year marriage? Leave the reality out and it makes for a great story. Put the reality back in and you think that they should have listened to the people who told them to stay away from each other. But there is something to glean from the movie. The girl is from a Muslim family (boy happens to be Mormon) and her mother tells her that their lives are sacred, and with that comes standards of behavior, and that is a good thing to embrace. For those of us who follow Christ, our lives are sacred, and we should embrace it with holy lives. Sacred lives hold marriage as sacred and do everything they can to make it work. Have we lost happily ever after because we have lost the sense of the sacred?