I keep getting replies about this on my Odyssey posts, so it's getting its own explanation:
Helen and Menelaus did not have an abusive or toxic marriage in the Homeric canon. Helen and Paris did not have a contrastingly positive and loving relationship.
If we choose to believe what Helen says, rather than what the (often misogynistic or else self-motivated) supporting cast say about her, then her being with Menelaus IS her happy ending, while being with Paris was outright miserable for her.
Within the Homeric canon — which IMHO takes precedence as the earliest version of the myth, with no obvious political agenda or bias against certain characters — Helen loves Menelaus.
When we see her within the walls of Troy, she misses her husband and their kids terribly. Helen says so aloud, within the walls of Troy's palace, meaning she truly has no reason to lie — on the contrary, voicing these thoughts is dangerous! But Helen does so anyway, and that means we really have to believe she's speaking truth here. Helen laments the fact that Aphrodite cursed her with a momentary passion for Paris, corrupting her mind and judgement enough that she left them. Doubly so because Helen finds Paris cowardly and detestable for his conduct surrounding the war — hiding himself safely in the palace even at great cost to the rest of his family and the common people of Troy. And Paris in this sense is directly contrasted with Menelaus, who is fighting on the frontline and happy to negotiate a truce/win a largely bloodless and profitless victory so long as he gets to go home with his kidnapped wife.
Like, Paris and Menelaus fight a duel over Helen where Menelaus resoundingly kicks Paris' ass. Before the duel, Hector — Paris' brother — calls him a coward with no redeeming qualities besides his pretty face. And Paris survives that duel only because Aphrodite repeatedly shields him from lethal attacks, then when he's again about to die spirits him away to the bedroom, where he basically just curls up and cries. By ancient Greek standards, and frankly to our modern sensibilities, Paris is an incompetent coward. He's not a catch. Helen does not want him.
I get why we have this conception that Paris is a preferable partner for Helen to Menelaus — because we think of him as the man she chose. Helen and Paris are a rebellious true love story, while Helen and Menelaus are a stuffy miserable arranged marriage.
But like...that's not true. Helen has tons of respect for Menelaus and none for Paris. As we all know from Pride and Prejudice, a marriage without respect is inevitably and exceedingly unhappy. Helen is only with Paris because Aphrodite is making her be with Paris.
And sure, it's tempting to turn that into a symbol of true love — Helen's love for Paris compels her to overlook his worst qualities! She loves him in her heart despite the conflict it causes with all the rational thoughts in her head!
But Aphrodite is not just the embodiment of love (really, more like lust and passion in a lot of early Greek mythos) — she's a character. She's a goddess. She's a more powerful person forcing Helen to be with Paris, against her own wishes! Literally in text, at the end of Iliad Book 3, Aphrodite shows up in Troy after saving Paris, planning to send Helen off to comfort her lover. And Helen immediately recognizes Aphrodite, and says that she'd way rather have the war end and go home with Menelaus than keep being Aphrodite's puppet, being made a lover to whichever man the goddess chooses for her. Helen tells Aphrodite that she's the one who loves Paris, not Helen herself, so she should go comfort the spineless prince.
And in response, Aphrodite threatens Helen into going to comfort and sleep with Paris. Aphrodite basically says "this is your life when I love you — imagine how hellish I can make things for you if I decide I hate you. So don't make me hate you. Go fuck Paris already."
Helen's relationship with Paris is coercive. We are shown that she's with him under duress from an infinitely more powerful deity.
If Helen ever loved Paris, it was because Aphrodite made her love him, made her ignore his flaws and see only his handsomeness, because Helen was a prize for Paris to win.
Remember, in the wider Greek mythology, Paris was asked to choose the most beautiful goddess among Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, and chose Aphrodite because he was most tempted by the bribe that she offered. And the bribe Aphrodite offered was Helen, the most beautiful woman, a demigoddess daughter of Zeus, for Paris to wed and bed. Never mind that Helen was already happily married to Menelaus — she was a prize for Paris to win, so Aphrodite made Helen reciprocate. With magically induced passion, with threats, with illusions, but not with Helen's own will. Because the only times we are ever shown Helen and Paris's relationship, it's a forced and toxic one Aphrodite is forcing them into as part of her own power trip.
Even when Helen is forced to be with Paris during the Iliad, under threat by Aphrodite, Helen says she wishes Paris had stayed to fight Menelaus since he's a worse fighter and would've died. Which Paris gets offended by, predictably. Their relationship is bad for both of them. They're together only because Aphrodite wills it so.
And again — yes, you can take that as a metaphor for how love and lust can make us stay in toxic relationships with terrible people. But Aphrodite is not just a metaphor for or the embodiment of love! She is also a goddess pulling the strings of mortals for her own satisfaction — which is a huge theme of the Iliad! It's a story of gods letting little people get trampled for the sake of their own ambitions and pride and goals! The gods are people and characters in Homeric epics every bit as much as the mortal characters are.
And if you want to talk non-Homeric texts? Many still support the idea Helen was happier with Menelaus than with Paris. Some even outright state that marrying Menelaus was her choice, in contrast to how Aphrodite manipulated her into being with Paris.
Helen, as the daughter of Leda and Zeus, as the foster daughter of Tyndareus, as the most beautiful woman alive and possibly the most powerful among mortals, was ridiculously in demand as a wife. So, it was proposed that she would choose her husband from among her many suitors, and all the rejected suitors swore to respect and defend her marriage no matter what. That is why the Trojan War happened. Because all these Greek kings had sworn to respect Helen's choice, and her choice was Menelaus! So when she was kidnapped and taken away from him, they had to commit their city-states' armies to getting her back. Agamemnon didn't blackmail Odysseus into joining the war — he reminded Odysseus, who had once been a suitor of Helen, that he swore an oath to defend Helen and Menelaus' marriage, and told Odysseus along with many other kings that he had to uphold it.
(Side note: yes, that's right! Odysseus initially wanted to marry Helen, and her cousin Penelope was arguably just his consolation prize since he proposed a solution to the many-fighting-suitors thing. Clytemnestra, Helen's sister, was given to Agamemnon as a consolation prize because Helen chose Agamemnon's brother Menelaus! That's a very interesting thing Nolan could've addressed in his movie and didn't.)
Helen loved Menelaus and was happy with him, because she chose him as her husband. A privilege most women in Ancient Greece wouldn't have had!
Yes, there are characters who claim Helen ran off with Paris willingly. Many Greek soldiers who are there reluctantly ask why they're leaving behind their beloved wives just because Menelaus couldn't keep his. In their words, Helen is a disloyal bitch. (I'm not even taking liberties in translation there — the term kunopis, or dog-eyed, is used to refer to Helen repeatedly, and when used to refer to a woman carries connotations of unfaithfulness/sexual promiscuity.) But those are always characters who don't want to be fighting a war, who want to go home, and therefore have personal incentive to frame the situation as "Helen made her choice, why are we being forced to fight and die over it?" We as readers are shown that Helen wants the Greeks to win the war so she can go home with Menelaus.
There's also the fact that, regardless of if Helen consented, Paris still violated xenia by seducing and running off with his host Menelaus' wife. You don't do that to the guy whose home you're a guest in!
When you add in the fact that (due to Aphrodite's pressure and Helen not being physically able to resist) Paris's relationship with Helen was in fact non-consensual — surely we as modern readers can at least recognize that if she was under some kind of Aphrodisiac (get it?) effect, or else fully had her mind controlled, Helen wasn't capable of giving real informed consent — well...
...you kind of do understand why Paris' actions started a war. Why the Greeks considered his relationship with Helen immoral, proof of broken oaths between guest and host as well as between husband and wife. Why they felt it had to be avenged, or at least repaired.
Because Helen should've been allowed to have a happy life with Menelaus, free of unfair godly bullshit.
Which is why the Odyssey makes a point of showing that ultimately, she did. She's back in Sparta, happily and lovingly married to Menelaus, watching her daughter also marry happily. Telemachus gets to hear multiple accounts of his father's intelligence, sure, but Helen and Menelaus also get to recall that unfortunate chapter of their past before putting it behind them.
As a final aside — a lot of the later literature that does portray Menelaus as a bad husband or asshole was written by Athenian authors, at times where Athens and Sparta were actively at war. That was political propaganda. It's the same as American Cold War media making all the villains Russian! They were playing into audience biases and stereotypes, and you have to consider that when looking at later, less positive views of Menelaus and his marriage to Helen.
