Anna Whitehouse - Wheres My Happy Ending?: Happily Ever After and How the Heck to Get There

CONTENTS

Anna Whitehouse and Matt Farquharson are the authors of the Sunday Times bestseller, Parenting the Sh*t out of Life. As Mother Pukka and Papa Pukka they are co-founders of MotherPukka, the website for people who happen to be parents. Their podcast, Dirty Mother Pukka, debuted at number three in the UK iTunes chart and regularly makes the top ten in the comedy category. They have both been journalists for more than ten years and live in London with their two daughters.

First published 2020 by Bluebird

This electronic edition first published 2021 by Bluebird

an imprint of Pan Macmillan

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EU representative: Macmillan Publishers Ireland Ltd, Mallard Lodge, Lansdowne Village, Dublin 4

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ISBN 978-1-5290-1371-9

Copyright Matt Farquharson and Anna Whitehouse 2020

Cover Design: Mel Four, Bluebird Art Department.

The right of Matt Farquharson and Anna Whitehouse to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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This book is for all the people wondering whats next

Firstly, wed like to thank everyone who weve quoted in these pages. Thank you to those friends and strangers who allowed us to peek into their lives in the most intimate way. Thank you to our families, who allowed us to share more of their lives than might reasonably be expected.

Thanks to Heart radio for opening up the door to so many interesting interviewees through the Ellie & Anna Have Issues show and podcast. It is the shows producers, Elena Guthrie and Lawrence Hall, who put us in touch with Saamirah and the throuple: Cathy, Thomas and Nicole.

A huge thanks needs to go to our literary agent, Abigail Bergstrom, who has that rare ability to encourage while critiquing. Everyone needs the trusted friend who tells you theres spinach in your teeth.

Thank you to all those academics and researchers whose work has been so helpful in separating whimsy from fact and helping to explain why we sometimes feel the ways that we do. And thanks to those who took the time to explain months of work and complex conclusions in easily quotable ways.

Thanks to these organisations for gathering all that work in navigable libraries, much of it available for free: academia.edu, the American Psychological Associations PsychNet, JAMA Network, PMC and the U.S. National Institutes of Healths National Library of Medicine, Research Gate, Sage Journals, Semantic Scholar, Springer Link, Taylor & Francis Online. You have taken us down hundreds of curious wormholes.

Thanks to the stat gatherers at the UK Office of National Statistics and US Census Bureau and General Social Survey. People dont often thank stat gatherers, but without you, wed know much less.

Thanks to the many journals that first bring interesting research to public attention, including, but not limited to: BMC Psychiatry, Journal of Sexual Medicine, Psychologies, Psychology Today, Science.

Thanks to Relate and Alain de Botton and The School of Life, which do so much to make the big questions feel easier to manage.

Thanks to Frederick at Tamera, who gave up several days of his life to guide Matt around and introduce him to remarkable people whose stories could have filled a book on their own.

Its also here that we need to thank Phillip Bodenham, whose Whitstable AirBnB cottage was where we wrote a significant chunk of the book to escape the infant hollering. We were paying to stay there, but without him we wouldnt have found Britains oldest fisherman, and his love of the area and recommendations helped us feel less isolated when in the writing hole.

And wed also like to thank everyone who we spoke to, in person or online, but whose words we couldnt use for one reason or another those interviewees who generously gave up time to speak to us, including all those followers of @mother_pukka and @papa_pukka who shared their stories: each tale revealed something wonderfully human, and were sorry we couldnt use more of them. Three hundred or so pages really arent very much with all those tales to tell.

To our girls, who werent really sure what we were doing but continue to use our first book as a doorstop.

And thanks to you for taking the time to read this book. None of us have much of it, and we hope you found this to be time well spent.

Book genres that make the most money, Mahogany Turner-Francis, Bookstr.com, 6 January 2017.

On reflection and with a decade to let the dust settle, possibly 94 per cent.

Single Lifestyles UK, Mintel, 2017.

Is Tinder a Match for Millennials? Mike Brown, LendEDU.com, 22 March 2017.

Kenneth P. Werrell, The Journal of American History .

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According to Lake Legal and Stowe Family Law (Facebook now crops up in a third of divorce cases over cheating and old flames, Mirror.co.uk, 20 January 2015).

Nearly a third of Brits admit to using a dating app while in a relationship, slatergordon.co.uk, 6 September 2017.

YouGov Omnibus, 30 January 2019.

Office for National Statistics data.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015.

Whos Breadwinning in Europe? A comparative analysis of maternal breadwinning in Great Britain and Germany, IPPR.org, 20 October 2015.

Manning up and w omaning d own : How husbands and wives report their earnings when she earns more, US Census Bureau, 6 June 2018.

Women and Gender, Harvard Business Review , 18 January 2019.

Benevolent Sexism and Mate Preferences , Pelin Gul and Tom R. Kupfer, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , 29 June 2018.

Cuddling and Spooning: Heteromasculinity and Homosocial Tactility among Student-athletes, Eric Anderson and Mark McCormack, Men and Masculinites , 12 March 2014.