The Art of the Earned Misunderstanding
How Emily Henry's Happy Place subverts a long-detested rom-com trope
Everyone hates the third-act-misunderstanding. I get why. It feels cheap, a way of introducing conflict without making anyone look too badly or revealing any serious character flaws. But as a reader, I want to see characters’ ugliest parts— how their shortcomings translate into the ways they hurt one another. It’s frustrating watching a completely unnecessary third act blowup over nothing. But it’s satisfying when it reveals something.
Emily Henry acknowledges this fact, this common gripe, in the author’s note of her new book, Happy Place. That’s probably because miscommunication is at the heart of this book: each of the romantic leads, who are exes, begins to think the other has moved on, that they do not care, when, in reality, they are both trying to hide how much they miss one another. Harriet sees Wyn buying a coffee table book on furniture and assumes it is for the purpose of impressing someone (it’s actually because he has ambitions of being a furniture designer). When Harriet wears a sultry dress and remarks that it’s her go-to for date night, Wyn takes this as confirmation that she is seeing a coworker that she had a potential flirtation with back when they were together.
But the dress is just a dress, and the coffee table book is just a coffee table book. Each burns in jealousy but perhaps also wishes the other to be unavailable just for simplicity’s sake. Wyn and Harriet, of course, do not discuss these assumptions. It’s easy to see how miscommunication led to their breakup.
But there is something deeper going on here. By the second act, we begin to understand why Harriet and Wyn broke up, and it goes deeper than a book or a dress. Wyn dropped everything to move to California with Harriet, and felt isolated and disconnected from his family. Harriet felt suffocated by the pressure of making Wyn’s move worth it to him, and kept her work-related stress to herself. Wyn moved back to Montana to care for his mother, and each began to privately assume they were burdening the other by reaching out. They lost touch. They broke up.
We also understand why they seem to have so much trouble communicating. Wyn grew up with two academically gifted sisters and felt inadequate in comparison, and carried this feeling to college when he compared himself to his successful and ambitious friends. Harriet’s family dealt with disagreements with shut doors and stony silences, making Harriet hyper-attuned to the emotions around her and terrified of inciting arguments with anyone.
And so, as so often happens in real life, Harriet’s and Wyn’s neuroses manifest in their relationships. Wyn has little sense of self outside of his identity as Harriet’s boyfriend, which only puts pressure on the relationship and leads to resentment down the line. Harriet fears confrontation so much that it feels easier to run from someone than to tell them when they’ve upset her or when she needs support. The self-destructive things they think they do for others, that they think makes their lives easier, actually only sabotages their relationships.
One of my favorite scenes in Happy Place happens toward the end of the book, when Harriet realizes that hers and Wyn’s people-pleasing tendencies are at the heart of their problems. “We’re fighting,” she declares, and tells Wyn all the things that bothered her about their relationship. He does the same. There’s no plot contrivance revealing the source of the grand misunderstanding, no apologetic confessions of love in the rain or in an airport (as much as I love these tropes). It’s just two people learning how to assert their own needs, and realizing that doing so is not only helpful to their relationship, but better for their own mental health. To me, that’s incredibly romantic.
Most of all, I like that so much character development happens individually, when the characters are single and learning about themselves. I think that’s where the exes-to-lovers structure shines in this book. Beyond the romance and intrigue of forbidden longing and regret and mutual pining, built into this trope is the necessity that these characters take time away from one another and change in their own ways. Harriet takes up pottery and has serious discussions with herself about whether her hospital intern lifestyle is sustainable for her mental health. Wyn seeks treatment for his depression and ventures into his own furniture business.
When they return to one another, Wyn and Harriet are not the same couple that once broke up. They have taken time apart and returned, stronger than before.
I think the misunderstanding trope often feels silly. We want to yell at the characters, If this small thing broke you up, literally how are you going to last long-term? Harriet and Wyn didn’t last long-term. But Happy Place gave them the opportunity to figure out why. And they did. It felt very real to me. And very, very hopeful.