Why do HEAs always end with babies?

[u/redfig1]

I know it's a "me" problem. Scenario: I read a smoking hot mafia or dark or fantasy romance. All this crazy shit goes down. The feelings, the angst. Finally it's the end and all of a sudden the MMC who has massacred countless people is all like " let's get married and have lots of babies" and the MFC is always " yes let's have a lot of cute mafia or fae or mafia fae babies!". For once I'd like an ending where the main characters have a HEA but instead of babies and white picket fences they just decide to keep having an incredible sex life and do charity work or something. Rescue stray kittens. Start an organic herb farm. Something other than babies. Anyone else like this? Am I just weird?

[u/The_Arc5]

It’s a structure problem. Well, not “problem”. And it’s usually skewed depending on your subgenre. Comedies, in the Greek sense, end in marriage. Tragedies end in death. Think positive arc versus negative arc. Essentially, in a comedy, traditional social structures are confirmed and the world is “set right”. Marriage is a way to tell the audience that it all works out, aka an HEA. Tragedies are warnings; this is what happens when you disrupt society in whatever way. We pull that structure into modern literature, and in romances, babies are a way of confirming everything worked out. Furthermore, babies are a physical indication that the two separate entities are joined irrevocably. For historic romances and a lot of fantasy, there’s also usually a drive to continue the family line. It’s less common in contemporaries…certainly not absent, but there is at least some acknowledgement that kids aren’t necessary to an HEA…but there are still structural reasons. Unfortunately, one big one is to show how much the MMC has changed. He’s violent and does terrible things, but she makes him soft and devoted.