A Choice I Made For Very Personal Reasons
In my recent post about reconsidering JK Rowling's writing of romance in the Harry Potter series in light of the additional information from her later works, I declared myself puzzled by the following words of Rowling's:
What I will say is that I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment.
I wrote:
And it is not quite clear why Ron/Hermione was "wish fulfillment." Did she unrealistically wish that two such different people could grow to be happy together? Or was she unrealistic in thinking that she could satisfy readers with a platonic relationship between the hero and the most important female character? Or was it something else? I really wish Watson had asked her what she meant instead of jumping into a discussion of the characters as people.
A conversation I was having with torrent56 in the comments of that post prompted me to mull further on this somewhat mysterious comment and now I believe I know what Rowling meant. At least, it's convincing to me though it may not be to anyone else.
I believe that Rowling meant that it was wish fulfillment that Ron would have a crush on, and fall in love with, Hermione.
I realize this may seem a startling thought in our fandom, where the prevailing question is generally "is Ron good enough to be with Hermione?" or "what on Earth does she see in him?" However, we have to remember that Rowling's perception of and intentions for her characters does not necessarily match our understanding of them. Again and again, she has expressed her expectation that the Hermione character will be unpopular, that she will be disliked, misunderstood, and made fun of. I remember Rowling saying that she gave Hermione an unusual name to reduce the possibility that unfortunate bookish little girls would be taunted for having the same name as the bossy bookish big-toothed nerd:
I consciously set out to choose a - a fairly unusual name for Hermione, because I didn't want a lot of fairly hard-working little girls to be teased if ever the book was published, because she is a very recognisable type - to which I belonged, when I was young.
Of course, this is all tied into the fact that Rowling wrote Hermione as a reflection of her younger self, or at least what she thought her younger self might have have been perceived as. Just before she said the thing about wish fulfillment, she said this:
I know that Hermione is incredibly recognizable to a lot of readers and yet you don’t see a lot of Hermiones in film or on TV except to be laughed at. I mean that the intense, clever, in some ways not terribly self-aware, girl is rarely the heroine and I really wanted her to be the heroine. She is part of me, although she is not wholly me. I think that is how I might have appeared to people when I was younger, but that is not really how I was inside.
So we are dealing here to some extent with Rowling's own insecurity, bad or hurtful experiences she might have had in her adolescence and early teen years, and possibly her modest exaggeration of how "nerdy" and "uncool" she actually was. The "wish fulfillment" may be less wishes that Rowling has now as a woman or a writer and more wishes she had when she was an "intense, clever, in some ways not terribly self-aware" girl: envy for people with more social ease, people who were able to entertain others and win liking because they were funny, people who were cool. It would not be at all surprising if she remembers wishing for a friend or friends who could ease her loneliness and provide a sort of bridge between her and the masses of more "normal" people, a kind of combination of buffer, shield, and interpreter.
This is exactly the sort of thing a good friend can do for a bright, shy, intense sort of person, as I know well from my own youthful experiences. And it is exactly what Ron---and Harry as well---do for Hermione in the Harry Potter books. Remember that in the books Hermione did not make a single friend at Hogwarts, not even Neville, before Harry and Ron took up with her. And Rowling was convinced that she couldn't make friends, with them or anyone else, without an extraordinary event bringing them together. She stated in an interview (which I can't find) that one of the few changes she made to the movie scripts is that she insisted that they restore the troll episode in the first movie because otherwise it was unrealistic that Ron and Harry become friends with Hermione and viewers wouldn't believe or accept it. I don't think she is right about this and obviously Kloves and his collaborators didn't feel that way or they wouldn't have left it out of the script in the first place, but it is what Rowling believed.
We can also remember Rowling "melting" when Kloves told her that Hermione was his favorite character:
“Steve turned to me while food was being ordered and said quietly, ‘You know who my favorite character is?’ I looked at him, red hair included, and thought: You’re going to say Ron. Please, please don’t say Ron - Ron’s so easy to love! And he said: ‘Hermione.’ At which point, under my standoffish, mistrusting exterior, I just melted. Because if he got Hermione, he got the books. He also, to a large extent, got me.”
It is natural that Rowling would be flattered by this, considering her strong identification with Hermione, but it also reads a bit oddly to us because many (most?) people in our old fandom didn't seem to find Ron "so easy to love" at all---quite the contrary! But Rowling saw him that way, and wrote him that way. For instance, Harry's love for Ron flowed quickly and easily. And Ron, despite his many insecurities and difficulties, has no trouble making friends, fitting in, being accepted by his peers. His combination of extraversion, kindness, quick wit, expressiveness of his own emotions, and a sort of everyman quality where his tastes, reactions, and instincts are common and normal make social life a much easier proposition for Ron than it is for Hermione. Or for Neville or Harry, for that matter.
Ron has other social advantages besides his personality. He has been reared from birth in the wizarding world and has internalized its values and prejudices. He automatically conforms to accepted wizarding manners. He has grown up in an intact, loving family with plenty of practice giving and receiving affection and managing conflict. And his path at Hogwarts is made easier in some ways because he is "just another Weasley": he has automatic allies (and, if necessary, protectors) in his older brothers Percy, Fred, and George, he knows he "belongs" in Gryffindor, and his particular look of red hair and freckles is widely known and accepted in the halls of Hogwarts.
Some people find it hard to imagine Hermione being attracted to Ron but I find it completely believable that her admiration/envy of some of his qualities would lead to attraction. Her uptightness craves his looseness and sense of fun. Her unusualness craves his normalcy. She desires the warm affection, approval, and companionship he gives so easily and naturally to Harry. As Rowling says, "just like her creator, she has a real weakness for a funny man."
We must also remember, of course, that Rowling's mental picture of Hermione's physical appearance and manner is quite, quite different from the version portrayed in the films by Emma Watson. Here is an interview (with Daniel Radcliffe!) where she addresses that directly:
Jo: To be honest, you and Rupert and Emma are all too good looking, frankly. You are. You know, the characters were geeky, and you...
Dan: Did you know that was going to happen? Did you sort of think they might...?
Jo: I'm not an idiot. I did, particularly when I... Do you know what, it was really lucky I spoke to Emma first on the phone before I met her. Because I fell absolutely in love with her. She said to me: "I've only ever acted in school drama plays and oh my God I'm so nervous I can't believe I got the part" and then she spoke for, like, 60 seconds at least without drawing breath and I just said "Emma, you're perfect." And then when I met her and she was this very beautiful - which she still is, of course - beautiful girl, I just kind of had to go "Oh, okay." It's film, you know, deal with it. I'm going to still see my gawky, geeky, ugly duckling Hermione in my mind.
Dan: Do you think that, in a way, we shot ourselves in the foot with things like that? Emma's reveal in the fourth film, where she comes down the stairs and there is supposed to have been this transformation...
Jo: Well, exactly.
Dan: Because we're all looking and going "well she's already a beautiful girl."
Jo: Yeah, big deal. Now she's a beautiful girl in a beautiful dress.
Dan: Yes.
Jo: And putting her in fairisle sweaters in the first film didn't make her ugly.
Dan: laughs
Jo: Not that Hermione in the books is ever "ugly", but it was quite a big deal for me that I had written a strong female character who was primarily about brain, and that she chose to become a little more groomed and glamorous, as us geeks do at a certain point in our lives. But I accepted it. Emma's a great actress and I loved her as a person. And I felt that there were so many connections between her and Hermione that, did it matter that she was beautiful? Come on.
Well, yes. Emma Watson shares many qualities with Hermione but she decidedly does NOT share Hermione's awkwardness. She is lovely, of course, but she is also fashion-conscious, well-groomed, and self-confident, with beautiful posture and elegant diction. In hair, make-up, mannerisms, and, of course, the loving caress of the camera, she is more "hot girl" than "awkward swot."
But that is not Hermione and---according to her, anyway---it was not Jo Rowling in her teenaged years.
I want to emphasize how much "wish fulfillment" Rowling gave her alter-ego Hermione, even without the whole romance thing. There was no troll in the bathroom in Rowling's real life. Maybe she had no real friends until much later when she became friends with Sean and experienced some of the normal adolescent pleasures of driving around, laughing, and mild misbehaving that she seems to remember so very fondly. And, though of course we now see her as an extraordinary successful super-achiever, she had no particular success in school or anywhere else as a teen. Her intensity and brightness and swottiness didn't win any science fairs or spelling bees or admission to Oxford, or anything like that. It's not even clear that she made very good grades or got that many A-levels, though she was Head Girl of her school, I believe.
But in Hermione's world, intensity and application to your books brings real power. And recognition, admiration, and success. Hermione not only gets lots of OWLS and Remus Lupin to call her the brightest witch of her age he's ever met, but she gets to literally save the world with her cleverness (okay, with some help from Harry). Harry and Ron admire her abilities without reservation, depend on her, and compliment her frequently. And from the very early age of 11, Hermione gets the comfort and companionship of her little group of friends, who accept her as she is, even before she "loosens up" and learns to be more groomed and less socially inept as she grows older.
So we have Hermione getting all that, which is perfectly understandable, perfectly typical of YA literature, and very enjoyable for all Rowling's swotty, awkward, bookish readers to experience vicariously. But, many wonder, why did Rowling's wish-fulfillment for Hermione not extend to her winning the heart of the hero? Or, to put it another way, why did Hermione fall in love with Ron when Harry was right there?
Well, we must remember how very much Hermione is based on Rowling as she was at the same age. Apparently the young Rowling was not sitting, alone and unfriended, and dreaming about a Frodo Baggins or a Clark Kent or a Luke Skywalker to come along so she could help them save the world and, by the way, win their love. Apparently her dreams were more simple---that the cute, relaxed, "cool" boys sitting in the back of the room with their legs stretched out and their clever quips that made the whole class laugh would turn a little of their warmth and charisma her way. That she could have some of the fun, and laughter, and acceptance that seemed to come so easily to other people, but not to her.
Why would Jo or Hermione crave a Harry? Harry was extraordinary, sure, but Jo and Hermione were already extraordinary themselves. Why would they need more of that? Even today, I suspect that Rowling wishes she could be more relaxed, have more friends, be normal. She shot straight from "poverty-stricken and depressed single mother" to "outrageously rich, famous, and successful" with almost no time in between. Also remember that Rowling's school years were affected by the very serious and ultimately fatal illness of her mother. Jo!Hermione would not be wish-attracted to parentless Harry with his demons and Dementor screams but to Ron's abundant, overflowing familial love and cheerful insouciance.
So Hermione not only gets two really good friends and all the spells she can memorize, but it also turns out that that cute, infuriating, incomprehensible boy finds her just as fascinating as she finds him. And perhaps this is the implausible part. If Ron is just a regular, normal boy much like Dean and Seamus, is it realistic that he would spend his entire adolescence crushing on his awkward, bookish friend, bristling with jealousy whenever she shows attention to or attracts attention from any other male, seemingly willing to spend quite a large proportion of his time teasing her, arguing with her, noticing what she does, and trying to impress her? After all, Dean and Seamus and the other regular Hogwarts guys don't seem interested in Hermione. Only Ron and the famous but awkward Quidditch star Krum seem to have the good taste to appreciate her. Well, and McClaggan when she is older.
I have long said that Ron's crush on Hermione is the thing I like best about him. In this case, he is not passively accepting the values of his society, or being lazy or conventional. Somewhere in Ron's normal, laid-back, pleasure-loving self there seems to be a craving for the exceptional that is expressed in his attraction to both Harry and Hermione. He chooses to hang out with them rather than with his fellow "normal guys" Dean and Seamus, even though they are handily available and clearly show during Ron's fight with Harry in Goblet of Fire that they would have accepted him. Ron's friendship with Harry requires him to be heroic and self-sacrificing, to constantly face dangers and difficult challenges, including spiders, and he complains but he does it. Hermione challenges him, belittles him, constantly one-ups him, and demands that he study and follow rules, and he responds by falling in love with her. I find it quite endearing.
But, and this is a big but, the social dynamics of our school years don't necessarily extend into adulthood. We shy outcasts tend to get better social skills as we grow up, and making friends and fitting in no longer seems as important or as difficult a challenge. Perhaps Hermione would grow bored with Ron as an adult. At any rate, her social capital would rise as she, like Rowling, learned to be smoother-mannered and better-groomed, as her hard work and ambition brought her distinction and success in her chosen career. And Ron's social capital, perhaps, would diminish, as being a funny and well-liked proprietor of a novelty store is not a particularly high-status career choice, even though it might be lucrative. I can imagine that without the constant demands of Harry's exciting school years, Ron could settle into an unchallenged laziness that Hermione might find unimpressive, though I think she would always need and enjoy his warmth, humor, and affection. Also, of course, the challenge of raising two bright children might be quite enough to keep Ron on his toes, and I can imagine Ron doing a large portion of the child care with his flexible shop-owner's schedule and Hermione's workaholic tendencies.
The other factor to keep in mind is that Hermione and Ron are very affectionate and loyal people. Perhaps at times they would find their frequent arguments or their different interests a challenge to their relationship but they are not the type to give up easily on someone they love. And I think Hermione will always be grateful to Ron for finding her lovable and Ron will always be grateful to Hermione for finding him special enough to marry.
But I see that I have fallen into my old pastime of defending R/Hr, which is not my topic. My topic is why J.K. Rowling said that R/Hr was wish fulfillment and why it was a choice she made for "very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility." And that, I think, goes back to her own adolescent wishes, which I suppose I must have shared.
And, seriously, who cares about credibility? I mean, is it credible that Harry would have defeated Voldemort? Of course it isn't! Credibility, schmedibility. Give me wish fulfillment any day.
What I will say is that I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment.
I wrote:
And it is not quite clear why Ron/Hermione was "wish fulfillment." Did she unrealistically wish that two such different people could grow to be happy together? Or was she unrealistic in thinking that she could satisfy readers with a platonic relationship between the hero and the most important female character? Or was it something else? I really wish Watson had asked her what she meant instead of jumping into a discussion of the characters as people.
A conversation I was having with torrent56 in the comments of that post prompted me to mull further on this somewhat mysterious comment and now I believe I know what Rowling meant. At least, it's convincing to me though it may not be to anyone else.
I believe that Rowling meant that it was wish fulfillment that Ron would have a crush on, and fall in love with, Hermione.
I realize this may seem a startling thought in our fandom, where the prevailing question is generally "is Ron good enough to be with Hermione?" or "what on Earth does she see in him?" However, we have to remember that Rowling's perception of and intentions for her characters does not necessarily match our understanding of them. Again and again, she has expressed her expectation that the Hermione character will be unpopular, that she will be disliked, misunderstood, and made fun of. I remember Rowling saying that she gave Hermione an unusual name to reduce the possibility that unfortunate bookish little girls would be taunted for having the same name as the bossy bookish big-toothed nerd:
I consciously set out to choose a - a fairly unusual name for Hermione, because I didn't want a lot of fairly hard-working little girls to be teased if ever the book was published, because she is a very recognisable type - to which I belonged, when I was young.
Of course, this is all tied into the fact that Rowling wrote Hermione as a reflection of her younger self, or at least what she thought her younger self might have have been perceived as. Just before she said the thing about wish fulfillment, she said this:
I know that Hermione is incredibly recognizable to a lot of readers and yet you don’t see a lot of Hermiones in film or on TV except to be laughed at. I mean that the intense, clever, in some ways not terribly self-aware, girl is rarely the heroine and I really wanted her to be the heroine. She is part of me, although she is not wholly me. I think that is how I might have appeared to people when I was younger, but that is not really how I was inside.
So we are dealing here to some extent with Rowling's own insecurity, bad or hurtful experiences she might have had in her adolescence and early teen years, and possibly her modest exaggeration of how "nerdy" and "uncool" she actually was. The "wish fulfillment" may be less wishes that Rowling has now as a woman or a writer and more wishes she had when she was an "intense, clever, in some ways not terribly self-aware" girl: envy for people with more social ease, people who were able to entertain others and win liking because they were funny, people who were cool. It would not be at all surprising if she remembers wishing for a friend or friends who could ease her loneliness and provide a sort of bridge between her and the masses of more "normal" people, a kind of combination of buffer, shield, and interpreter.
This is exactly the sort of thing a good friend can do for a bright, shy, intense sort of person, as I know well from my own youthful experiences. And it is exactly what Ron---and Harry as well---do for Hermione in the Harry Potter books. Remember that in the books Hermione did not make a single friend at Hogwarts, not even Neville, before Harry and Ron took up with her. And Rowling was convinced that she couldn't make friends, with them or anyone else, without an extraordinary event bringing them together. She stated in an interview (which I can't find) that one of the few changes she made to the movie scripts is that she insisted that they restore the troll episode in the first movie because otherwise it was unrealistic that Ron and Harry become friends with Hermione and viewers wouldn't believe or accept it. I don't think she is right about this and obviously Kloves and his collaborators didn't feel that way or they wouldn't have left it out of the script in the first place, but it is what Rowling believed.
We can also remember Rowling "melting" when Kloves told her that Hermione was his favorite character:
“Steve turned to me while food was being ordered and said quietly, ‘You know who my favorite character is?’ I looked at him, red hair included, and thought: You’re going to say Ron. Please, please don’t say Ron - Ron’s so easy to love! And he said: ‘Hermione.’ At which point, under my standoffish, mistrusting exterior, I just melted. Because if he got Hermione, he got the books. He also, to a large extent, got me.”
It is natural that Rowling would be flattered by this, considering her strong identification with Hermione, but it also reads a bit oddly to us because many (most?) people in our old fandom didn't seem to find Ron "so easy to love" at all---quite the contrary! But Rowling saw him that way, and wrote him that way. For instance, Harry's love for Ron flowed quickly and easily. And Ron, despite his many insecurities and difficulties, has no trouble making friends, fitting in, being accepted by his peers. His combination of extraversion, kindness, quick wit, expressiveness of his own emotions, and a sort of everyman quality where his tastes, reactions, and instincts are common and normal make social life a much easier proposition for Ron than it is for Hermione. Or for Neville or Harry, for that matter.
Ron has other social advantages besides his personality. He has been reared from birth in the wizarding world and has internalized its values and prejudices. He automatically conforms to accepted wizarding manners. He has grown up in an intact, loving family with plenty of practice giving and receiving affection and managing conflict. And his path at Hogwarts is made easier in some ways because he is "just another Weasley": he has automatic allies (and, if necessary, protectors) in his older brothers Percy, Fred, and George, he knows he "belongs" in Gryffindor, and his particular look of red hair and freckles is widely known and accepted in the halls of Hogwarts.
Some people find it hard to imagine Hermione being attracted to Ron but I find it completely believable that her admiration/envy of some of his qualities would lead to attraction. Her uptightness craves his looseness and sense of fun. Her unusualness craves his normalcy. She desires the warm affection, approval, and companionship he gives so easily and naturally to Harry. As Rowling says, "just like her creator, she has a real weakness for a funny man."
We must also remember, of course, that Rowling's mental picture of Hermione's physical appearance and manner is quite, quite different from the version portrayed in the films by Emma Watson. Here is an interview (with Daniel Radcliffe!) where she addresses that directly:
Jo: To be honest, you and Rupert and Emma are all too good looking, frankly. You are. You know, the characters were geeky, and you...
Dan: Did you know that was going to happen? Did you sort of think they might...?
Jo: I'm not an idiot. I did, particularly when I... Do you know what, it was really lucky I spoke to Emma first on the phone before I met her. Because I fell absolutely in love with her. She said to me: "I've only ever acted in school drama plays and oh my God I'm so nervous I can't believe I got the part" and then she spoke for, like, 60 seconds at least without drawing breath and I just said "Emma, you're perfect." And then when I met her and she was this very beautiful - which she still is, of course - beautiful girl, I just kind of had to go "Oh, okay." It's film, you know, deal with it. I'm going to still see my gawky, geeky, ugly duckling Hermione in my mind.
Dan: Do you think that, in a way, we shot ourselves in the foot with things like that? Emma's reveal in the fourth film, where she comes down the stairs and there is supposed to have been this transformation...
Jo: Well, exactly.
Dan: Because we're all looking and going "well she's already a beautiful girl."
Jo: Yeah, big deal. Now she's a beautiful girl in a beautiful dress.
Dan: Yes.
Jo: And putting her in fairisle sweaters in the first film didn't make her ugly.
Dan: laughs
Jo: Not that Hermione in the books is ever "ugly", but it was quite a big deal for me that I had written a strong female character who was primarily about brain, and that she chose to become a little more groomed and glamorous, as us geeks do at a certain point in our lives. But I accepted it. Emma's a great actress and I loved her as a person. And I felt that there were so many connections between her and Hermione that, did it matter that she was beautiful? Come on.
Well, yes. Emma Watson shares many qualities with Hermione but she decidedly does NOT share Hermione's awkwardness. She is lovely, of course, but she is also fashion-conscious, well-groomed, and self-confident, with beautiful posture and elegant diction. In hair, make-up, mannerisms, and, of course, the loving caress of the camera, she is more "hot girl" than "awkward swot."
But that is not Hermione and---according to her, anyway---it was not Jo Rowling in her teenaged years.
I want to emphasize how much "wish fulfillment" Rowling gave her alter-ego Hermione, even without the whole romance thing. There was no troll in the bathroom in Rowling's real life. Maybe she had no real friends until much later when she became friends with Sean and experienced some of the normal adolescent pleasures of driving around, laughing, and mild misbehaving that she seems to remember so very fondly. And, though of course we now see her as an extraordinary successful super-achiever, she had no particular success in school or anywhere else as a teen. Her intensity and brightness and swottiness didn't win any science fairs or spelling bees or admission to Oxford, or anything like that. It's not even clear that she made very good grades or got that many A-levels, though she was Head Girl of her school, I believe.
But in Hermione's world, intensity and application to your books brings real power. And recognition, admiration, and success. Hermione not only gets lots of OWLS and Remus Lupin to call her the brightest witch of her age he's ever met, but she gets to literally save the world with her cleverness (okay, with some help from Harry). Harry and Ron admire her abilities without reservation, depend on her, and compliment her frequently. And from the very early age of 11, Hermione gets the comfort and companionship of her little group of friends, who accept her as she is, even before she "loosens up" and learns to be more groomed and less socially inept as she grows older.
So we have Hermione getting all that, which is perfectly understandable, perfectly typical of YA literature, and very enjoyable for all Rowling's swotty, awkward, bookish readers to experience vicariously. But, many wonder, why did Rowling's wish-fulfillment for Hermione not extend to her winning the heart of the hero? Or, to put it another way, why did Hermione fall in love with Ron when Harry was right there?
Well, we must remember how very much Hermione is based on Rowling as she was at the same age. Apparently the young Rowling was not sitting, alone and unfriended, and dreaming about a Frodo Baggins or a Clark Kent or a Luke Skywalker to come along so she could help them save the world and, by the way, win their love. Apparently her dreams were more simple---that the cute, relaxed, "cool" boys sitting in the back of the room with their legs stretched out and their clever quips that made the whole class laugh would turn a little of their warmth and charisma her way. That she could have some of the fun, and laughter, and acceptance that seemed to come so easily to other people, but not to her.
Why would Jo or Hermione crave a Harry? Harry was extraordinary, sure, but Jo and Hermione were already extraordinary themselves. Why would they need more of that? Even today, I suspect that Rowling wishes she could be more relaxed, have more friends, be normal. She shot straight from "poverty-stricken and depressed single mother" to "outrageously rich, famous, and successful" with almost no time in between. Also remember that Rowling's school years were affected by the very serious and ultimately fatal illness of her mother. Jo!Hermione would not be wish-attracted to parentless Harry with his demons and Dementor screams but to Ron's abundant, overflowing familial love and cheerful insouciance.
So Hermione not only gets two really good friends and all the spells she can memorize, but it also turns out that that cute, infuriating, incomprehensible boy finds her just as fascinating as she finds him. And perhaps this is the implausible part. If Ron is just a regular, normal boy much like Dean and Seamus, is it realistic that he would spend his entire adolescence crushing on his awkward, bookish friend, bristling with jealousy whenever she shows attention to or attracts attention from any other male, seemingly willing to spend quite a large proportion of his time teasing her, arguing with her, noticing what she does, and trying to impress her? After all, Dean and Seamus and the other regular Hogwarts guys don't seem interested in Hermione. Only Ron and the famous but awkward Quidditch star Krum seem to have the good taste to appreciate her. Well, and McClaggan when she is older.
I have long said that Ron's crush on Hermione is the thing I like best about him. In this case, he is not passively accepting the values of his society, or being lazy or conventional. Somewhere in Ron's normal, laid-back, pleasure-loving self there seems to be a craving for the exceptional that is expressed in his attraction to both Harry and Hermione. He chooses to hang out with them rather than with his fellow "normal guys" Dean and Seamus, even though they are handily available and clearly show during Ron's fight with Harry in Goblet of Fire that they would have accepted him. Ron's friendship with Harry requires him to be heroic and self-sacrificing, to constantly face dangers and difficult challenges, including spiders, and he complains but he does it. Hermione challenges him, belittles him, constantly one-ups him, and demands that he study and follow rules, and he responds by falling in love with her. I find it quite endearing.
But, and this is a big but, the social dynamics of our school years don't necessarily extend into adulthood. We shy outcasts tend to get better social skills as we grow up, and making friends and fitting in no longer seems as important or as difficult a challenge. Perhaps Hermione would grow bored with Ron as an adult. At any rate, her social capital would rise as she, like Rowling, learned to be smoother-mannered and better-groomed, as her hard work and ambition brought her distinction and success in her chosen career. And Ron's social capital, perhaps, would diminish, as being a funny and well-liked proprietor of a novelty store is not a particularly high-status career choice, even though it might be lucrative. I can imagine that without the constant demands of Harry's exciting school years, Ron could settle into an unchallenged laziness that Hermione might find unimpressive, though I think she would always need and enjoy his warmth, humor, and affection. Also, of course, the challenge of raising two bright children might be quite enough to keep Ron on his toes, and I can imagine Ron doing a large portion of the child care with his flexible shop-owner's schedule and Hermione's workaholic tendencies.
The other factor to keep in mind is that Hermione and Ron are very affectionate and loyal people. Perhaps at times they would find their frequent arguments or their different interests a challenge to their relationship but they are not the type to give up easily on someone they love. And I think Hermione will always be grateful to Ron for finding her lovable and Ron will always be grateful to Hermione for finding him special enough to marry.
But I see that I have fallen into my old pastime of defending R/Hr, which is not my topic. My topic is why J.K. Rowling said that R/Hr was wish fulfillment and why it was a choice she made for "very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility." And that, I think, goes back to her own adolescent wishes, which I suppose I must have shared.
And, seriously, who cares about credibility? I mean, is it credible that Harry would have defeated Voldemort? Of course it isn't! Credibility, schmedibility. Give me wish fulfillment any day.