Marriage In Genre Fiction

Traditionally,  a hero and heroine married at the end of a novel and lived happily ever after in subsequent volumes, if any, to be separated only by death, which could happen. Dornford Yates's Richard Chandos was widowed and remarried. However, Yates's Boy Pleydell, reflecting the author's experience, was divorced and remarried but the divorce occurred discretely between volumes and was never discussed or explained.

Some heroes are unsuited to the combination of marriage and continued adventures so their authors arrange their fictional biographies accordingly. In the case of Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry:

Kathryn McCormac would not leave her husband even for Flandry;

Kossara Vymezal was murdered;

Flandry and Miriam Abrams did marry but later.

Would Manse Everard and Wanda Tamberly have married if Anderson had continued the Time Patrol series? They were moving in that direction but almost inperceptibly. SM Stirling assumes their marriage in his sequel, "A Slip in Time."

In adventure fiction, the characters, even if married, would escape the mundane fate that might be explored in a mainstream novel:

 

"'Isn't that how marriages work? The days go by and you settle into a routine and piece by piece everything is taken away from you until there are two complete strangers sitting in the same room.'"

-Anthony Horowitz, Forever And A Day (London, 2018), 14, p. 158.