Historically-speaking, marriage is the tale's success. As I cover in a past post, security matters to both the unattached princess and the second or third or fourth son who needs a kingdom of his own.
But even when Perrault and others were writing these tales down, romance as a personal connection (not an arrangement) was creeping over the horizon.
Walt Disney rather cleverly solved the issue of "What if he wakes her up and they hate each other?" by having the prince meet Sleeping Beauty before she goes to sleep. A strong short story by, I believe, Vivian Vande Velde postulates that the prince can enter others' dreams. Presumably, he and the princess meet in dreams before he arrives to wake her. And I wrote a short story years ago in which I made Sleeping Beauty the villain and the witch the heroine (long before Angelina Jolie got in on the act).
Cinderella and the prince at least have the ball (although various versions of that tale also provide more contact between the protagonists), but a princess over 100 years old and a prince who purposefully fought his way through thorns begs the question, Does he want to settle down? Isn't he obviously really in this quest for the adventure? (The second video addresses Sleeping Beauty.)
