You see, Hansel and Gretel don’t just show up at the end of this story. They show up. And then they get their heads cut off. Just thought you’d like to know.
A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.