By MIRANDA DEVINE
In the upcoming movie, Sex and the City 2, we hear the much-ballyhooed marriage of Carrie and Mr Big is on the rocks. That was the marriage which formed the climax of the original Sex and the City blockbuster, keeping millions of romantically inclined women of a certain age on the edge of their seats until true love triumphed at last with a walk down the aisle - in Vivienne Westwood champagne silk, of course.
The wedding was the culmination of an excruciatingly unrequited love affair that sustained six seasons of the hit TV series. So what to do now the mouse has been cornered, the rat trapped, the man bagged? There's no drama in happily ever after, so you either admit the franchise is finished or you create trouble in paradise.
Edd AragonCredit: Edd Aragon
In the sequel, due to open in Australia in early June, the fairytale ending of SATC 1, which so annoyed feminists, is under threat.
The storyline so far divulged in trailers, rumours and interviews with the cast - spoiler alert! - is that Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) spots her beloved (Chris Noth) flirting at a bar with Penelope Cruz and falls into a funk about her two-year marriage, which has lost its spark.
''Big and I are getting a little too Mr and Mrs Married,'' she wails. She gets pregnant. She runs into her old flame Aidan on the streets of Abu Dhabi (don't ask). Will the marriage survive?
It's a silly movie but the enduring popularity of the Austen-esque search for Mr Right in popular culture shows feminism and the sexual revolution haven't changed a thing. Women and men still dream of monogamous marriage and family amid deteriorating social stability.
To slow down the action in an era in which courtship and consummation overlap, love is often temporarily unrequited. But whether it is for a cold commitmentphobe like Mr Big or for a self-denying vampire who loves you too much to ravish you in Twilight, the fairytale is the same.
One of the most watched videos on YouTube last year was about marriage: 48 million hits and rising. The video of Jill and Kevin's Big Day shows a wedding in Minnesota in which the couple and their bridal party dance down the church aisle in a joyous celebration of love and friendship that captivated the imagination of the world. The video went viral within days of being posted by a family member, showing the perennial appeal of a happy marriage and all it implies for a stable and dynamic society.
More than two millenniums ago, Confucius sang the praises of marriage as the basic foundation of civilisation, with its main purpose to cultivate virtue, establish social cohesion and harmony. Aristotle saw the family as the foundation stone of society.
But marriage increasingly is under threat, from sky-high divorce rates and de facto unions to a push for same-sex marriage, which confuses legitimate gay rights with the undermining of a battered institution maligned as misogynistic and fostering intolerance.
Only a few days after the Jill and Kevin wedding video went up on YouTube came the spoof: Jill and Kevin's Last Day, which takes place in a divorce court, with the lawyers and judges dancing around the courtroom. While amusing, it fulfilled a pessimistic modern expectation that fairytales must inevitably disintegrate, that modern spouses are too weak and self-indulgent to weather the tempests any long marriage brings.
The most high-profile marriages - such as Tiger Woods' - seem destined to end in tears, as gossip magazines stage death watches on celebrity unions, and report break-ups with lascivious glee. Woods was the poster boy for the misery marriage narrative - the husband who seemed too good to be true, was. Not only did he excel at golf but he excelled at cheating on his wife.
When Sandra Bullock's marriage collapsed a few days after she won this year's best actress Oscar for The Blind Side, having been blindsided by her husband's Tiger-like infidelities, the story of the Oscars Curse emerged. Bullock was following a long line of actresses - Kate Winslet, Reese Witherspoon, Hilary Swank, Halle Berry and Helen Hunt - who won the award only to find their marriages collapse soon afterwards.
What can we make of the Oscars Curse: that as women become more successful in their careers inevitably their marriages must break under the pressure? Or that husbands could not cope with their wives' success? Or the wives suddenly decided they were worth more?
Perhaps, more likely, it is just that celebrity unions are inclined to brittleness, because of the unique pressures and temptations of that self-obsessed industry.
Celebrity breakdowns like those of Bullock and Woods show when marriages are bad, they are toxic. But they are the exception. More marriages survive than don't, especially in Australia where more than two in three remain intact, while divorce rates have been dropping and marriage rates increasing.
Regardless of Hollywood pessimism, a generation that has felt first-hand the effects of marriage breakdown and instability is embracing the institution afresh.
Instinctively they know the truth of what C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:
''If you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned person for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them.''
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