Commentary: Women deserve a different kind of 'happily ever after'

The finale of Netflix’s dynamic and delicious retelling of “My Brilliant Career” delivers the kind of love story modern women have been craving.

The six-part miniseries based on the 1901 protofeminist novel follows a talented, wild young woman, Sybylla, played by Australian actor Philippa Northeast, who is recklessly bold and almost feral in her luminosity. Sybylla yearns to be a writer and has absolutely no interest in getting married until her family’s debts become dire, and of course, she falls in love.

We know how this story ends. He proposes; she would accept, and get both the brilliant career and the man. Except (apologies in advance, as I give away the ending) she says, “No.” Sybylla chooses herself, her art, her writing, even though she loves him. That is what makes her choice so transformative. She isn’t escaping a toxic relationship; she hasn’t fallen out of love. She simply understands that, in this particular life, there is something she wants more.

I rewatched the ending three times and cried my eyes out. Why, as a woman and as a filmmaker, did this ending feel almost radical to me?

Like millions of girls, I grew up on Disney fairy tales. But as an adult, I’ve started to understand how those stories, so deeply burrowed into my subconscious, have damaged me. I watched “The Little Mermaid” so many times as a girl that giving up your voice for a man practically became a core value.

The princess can be brave, clever and adventurous. She can survive witches, curses and monsters. But somewhere near the end, she must be saved by Prince Charming. And his arrival tells us something important: The story is complete. They live happily ever after. The end.

I absorbed that idea more deeply than I realized. No matter what else I could accomplish, somewhere inside me was the belief that finding my Prince Charming was still my ultimate ending.

I’ve even lived a version of this: When I was 28, I converted to Orthodox Judaism so I could marry my Jewish partner. I went to Israel. I studied in seminary. I changed enormous parts of my life for five years, from how I dressed to what I ate, because I believed so completely in the romantic magnitude of what I was doing. I was running toward my happily ever after.

And then I came home from our honeymoon and immediately found myself sitting with a devastating thought: What if this wasn’t actually the life I wanted?

There was something almost impossibly painful about stepping away from the dream I had manifested. But there was also something profoundly liberating about it. Perhaps I hadn’t failed at the fairy tale, perhaps the storybook ending was simply too small.

There are other kinds of great love stories women connect with. One of the things I’ve always loved about “Sex and the City” is that underneath the dates, marriages, break-ups and Cosmopolitans, another love story was always unfolding: These women are each other’s great loves.

That resonates deeply with me. I’ve been blessed with extraordinary female friendships. Women who’ve witnessed entire eras of my life, held me through heartbreak, celebrated my victories and told me the truth when I didn’t want to hear it. They are unquestionably among the great loves of my life. But “My Brilliant Career” offered another possibility that somehow felt even more revolutionary. What if the great love of a woman’s life could be herself?

To be clear, I do believe that women can create extraordinary lives inside relationships. I have experienced loving and supportive relationships where my ambition is not merely tolerated but fiercely protected.

And I love men. I’m not swearing off romance and disappearing into the woods. This isn’t about lack. It’s about abundance, about discovering that a life can be wildly full of love without romantic love having to be the end game.

But there is another complicated piece of this for women. Whether it comes from biology or thousands of years of social conditioning, women have long occupied the role of caretaker. There can be enormous beauty in that instinct, but care takes energy. Loving someone takes up space inside you. Their fears live somewhere in your mind. Their happiness matters to your happiness. Their needs become part of the invisible architecture of your day.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether women need certain periods in their lives when all of that extraordinary energy gets turned inward. For most of my adult life, I moved from one serious relationship into another. I have now been single for much of the last four years.

And in that solitude, I have traveled further into myself than I ever had before. Into my psyche. My sexuality. My creativity. Into corners of myself I don’t think I could have reached while another person’s needs and rhythms were woven into my everyday life.

Being alone allowed me to ask a question I had never really asked before: If nobody were coming to save me, what kind of life would I build? The answer, it turns out, is a wild, expansive life that feels entirely, unapologetically my own. And as a filmmaker, eventually that question found its way into my work.

Last year I made a short based on Kim Hooper’s book “Woman on the Verge.” I called my adaptation “After Ever After,” a title that contained the very question I’d been asking myself: What happens after the happy couple have sailed into the sunset? The film became my own twist on the Prince Charming-as-savior myth.

Which is why the ending of “My Brilliant Career” broke something open in me. Sybylla runs through a field toward the man she loves. It contains all the visual language we recognize: the sweeping landscape, the urgency, the romance. It looks like the ending we’ve seen a thousand times. Except it isn’t. She chooses herself.

Perhaps the new fairy tale is simply that romantic love doesn’t need to be the final destination of every woman’s story. Maybe marriage is one ending. Maybe motherhood is another. Maybe friendship. Maybe adventure. A room of one’s own. A business. A book. A film.

Maybe there doesn’t need to be an ending at all. We’ve spent generations offering little girls fairy tales about running toward love. I want to give them love stories about women running toward their own lives. I want them to be engrossed in that slow-motion run. Feel the wind in their hair and hear the enormous cinematic crescendo. But at the other end of that field, I want there to be a blank page for them to fill.

In my happy ending, I want to run toward the beating of my own heart. I want my life, my art and the woman I am still becoming to be the great love story of my life.

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Nicole Ackermann is a South African writer and filmmaker known for directing commercials for companies including Universal Studios, Nintendo and Pepsi.