At Downton Abbey, modern love is in the air

If "Downton Abbey" taught us anything Sunday night, it's that there's an art to the happy ending.

Forget Lady Sybil and Branson, off in Dublin in over-eager bliss. Ditto for Cora's recovery from Spanish flu. Even Bates' escape from death row isn't the greatest victory of season two.

For many, it is Lady Mary and her cousin Matthew Crawley's engagement, after what is literally years of emotional torment-launched, like many romances, by their initial massive dislike of each other.

Through war, scandal, engagements and death, Mary and Matthew quite fairly earn their happy ending. Any idiot can get married (see also: Daisy), but not every idiot goes into marriage quite so honestly, particularly in an era when etiquette demanded discretion, often to an emotionless fault.

Among their biggest hurdles is Mary's very brief affair with a handsome (and dead) Turk. Her tumble with the unfortunate man leaves her, as her mother, Cora, puts it, "damaged goods." Mary does decent damage control and manages to wrangle an engagement to the financially suitable but entirely smarmy news mogul Sir Richard Carlisle. He'll keep her secret, she'll maintain her lifestyle, society will greenlight it.

Matthew, though not stained by scandal, brings his share of quirks. A lawyer by trade, he's a hesitant, new aristocrat, not entirely comfortable with the formalities of the upper class. He is rendered doubly cynical by his service in World War I. And his mother's a bit much.

Then there's Lavinia, Matthew's recently deceased fiancée/distraction from Mary who had the deathbed gall to wish him happiness without her. What some men might've taken as the ultimate permission to date leaves melancholy-prone Matthew convinced that the best way to honor Lavinia's memory is to die a bachelor and dismiss any thoughts of future marital bliss.

As Mary notes, "...We carry more luggage than the porters at King's Cross."

Still, she owns her culpability, and where she might've spent the rest of her life begging her family's forgiveness and placating Sir Richard, she instead calls off their wedding and reveals her secret affair to Matthew. Exile in New York is preferable to a loveless marriage. Bravo!

In a bigger indication of the social changes afoot, Matthew simply chalks up Mary's sexual experience to Mary being Mary, and he refuses to "forgive" her for doing so. What's more, he admits he was wrong when, in the throes of grief, he rejected Mary's friendship at Lavinia's graveside.

"You've lived your life and I've lived mine. Now it's time we've lived them together," says Thoroughly Modern Matthew before proposing.

That's what made the Twitterverse explode with virtual cheers Sunday night - Matthew and Mary both said yes to a life without pretense. Life, they've learned, is far too short to regret the past; love trumps perfect form.

The rest of the Crawleys follow suit, clinging to love and friendship in a rapidly changing world. Granted, their humanity emerges in the gilded halls of the wealthy, but even the privileged have much to lose by breaking rules in pursuit of a more authentic life.

It's what Lord Grantham calls Lavinia's last gift to her almost-family: "a reminder of what really matters."

And because the Dowager Countess Violet - the family matriarch and authority on All Things Proper - seconds the notion ("The aristocracy has not survived by its intransigeance...We must work with what we've got.") we viewers know that next season will proceed in good form, indeed.