One Woman's Tale and the Myths of Happiness

“Every moment wasted looking back keeps one from moving forward.” —Hillary Clinton.

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In a San Francisco airport lounge, I was reading Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky’s new book, The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy but Doesn’t What Shouldn’t Make You Happy but Does (January 13, 2013), when a woman who seemed to be in her forties approached me. She was from one of the countries in the Horn of Africa.

“Oh, you are reading about that thing,” she muttered. I told her I was interested in the field of positive psychology.

Strangers, it is said, will at times share with you more about the story of their lives than a friend or relative. The repercussion for the narrator is minimal because the chance of the two parties ever meeting again is extremely rare.

The woman, whom I will call “Jasmine,” came to the U.S. in the late 1980s. After two years in Chicago, she met an American man two years her senior. He was relentless and methodical in his pursuit of her. Phone calls and flowers became her daily fare and started flowing like a stream of water. She was equally smitten and married the man at age 23. The two came from two different backgrounds: different races and different socio-economic backgrounds. His family was quite well-off and bought their only son and his new bride a house which was a shrine of ostentation: It had six bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a big swimming pool. Jasmine was a young woman of modest means and had lived a relatively sparse life. But the two were full of life, full of energy, and full of love. He was tall, handsome, and brilliant with a lot of charm and charisma. Their first year was memorable. They were best friends and each other’s confidants. They spent a great deal of time together and talked about everything, from the mundane (what colors each liked) to the serious (how many children they wanted). Their relationship was harmonious and romantic sparks flew right and left. After the first year, the couple had a daughter. A year later, another daughter was born. The children brought joy to her, she said, with a broad and beaming smile stamped on her face.

Two years later, the couple’s once romantic and cozy relationship had turned adversarial. The relationship became riddled with nasty arguments.  “We couldn’t stand each other,” she retorted. “For the first two years, my husband was number one in my own constellation,” she said, “but then, my children became my top priority.” Jasmine became busy with the children and their care, and her husband became resentful because he was not getting enough attention.

Then, one day, events took an alarming and dangerous turn. Jasmine was putting gas in her car when suddenly her husband parked behind her in the gas station. She was incredulous seeing her husband. She thought that he was following her. An hour before their encounter, her husband had grilled her about where she was going and why she was leaving. He had a possessive streak that annoyed her. He was, for all practical purposes, a control freak. What happened next was not in the playbook. Jasmine told me that she hurled a big cup of Coke she was drinking at her husband. Then, she approached him and started punching him and yelling, “Are you following me?” Her husband acted like a gentleman in front of the people at the gas station. He could have won an Academy Award for his superb performance. Jasmine was the one who was out of control. The police were called and came. Jasmine was arrested for assault and battery.

Normally, it is the husband who is charged with domestic violence in the U.S. and Jasmine’s case was an anomaly.   Her husband got an unusual opportunity to eviscerate her. He accused his wife of neglecting their children, child abuse, and even beating him up occasionally. His testimony, Jasmine argued, did not contain a grain of truth. Jasmine was found guilty of a misdemeanor for domestic violence and sentenced to three years’ probation. 

After the court case, Jasmine and her husband separated. She was, after all, under a restraining order not to come close to her husband. The couple, meanwhile, had joint custody of the children.

After Jasmine fulfilled her court requirements and three years had elapsed, she and her husband began to reassess their relationship. It was a highly combustible situation. She was twenty-eight years old, separated, and in an alien land with no relatives to support her. She felt lonely and fearful she might lose her children. After three years of separation, she went back to her husband. Her family back in Africa and her friends in Chicago were mystified. To them, it was like watching a scary movie:  a combination of horror and amazement. They started their opposition with a full-court press.  “Do everyone a favor,” her friends admonished her, “and end this child-like fantasy.” Why she returned to her husband, though a puzzling question, was not beyond all conjecture. Jasmine admitted that, while she professed so much abhorrence toward her husband, she still had feelings for him. Lowering her voice to nearly a whisper, she said, “I missed him and became nostalgic for the good times we had.”  The depth of betrayal and humiliation he had caused her became a thing of the past. However, a relationship built on tenuous pillars, like a house of cards, is destined to tumble.

Two years after the couple came back together; the marriage slowly became a life of grinding hardship. The good times faded and bad news came in batches. She thought she was caught in a volatile mix of manipulation, lies, and deception and felt she was in the belly of the beast. Jasmine herself confessed that she was verbally abusive and distant. She started avoiding her husband. In a way, the two were roommates more than a couple, more like fellow boarders than partners. “I made him unwanted, and he became more hostile,” she said. A husband deprived of loving would become frustrated.

 Then, there was the horrifying discovery. Her husband, it appeared, was leading a secret life under her nose. He was cheating on her and she caught him chatting with women online. Obviously, he was into internet dating, but she was amazed at how he had gone to increasingly elaborate lengths to hide his dark secret. His laptop, furthermore, was a den of pornography.  “How could a family man and an icon in the community engage in such morally repugnant practices,” she wondered. But the biggest lie—the granddaddy of all lies—was his concealing an infidelity. One day, her husband made an astounding confession: He had fathered a child. Jasmine was livid. She knew her marriage was hanging in the balance and had to listen and heed her own inner voices. She filed for divorce.

Her survival instinct kicked in.  Jasmine, accompanied by her children, got up, dusted herself off, and embarked on a life of singlehood. The news of her filing for divorce spread like wildfire. Before the divorce even became final, men were calling her and trying their luck. Americans, Asians, Arabs, her fellow countrymen and “even Somalis,” she said, laughing. The wheels were in motion for a change. Contrary to what her former husband had told her (that no man would marry her with two young children) Jasmine was hotly pursued, and she enjoyed the attention. Less than six months after her divorce became final, she fell in love with a man from her native country. Unlike her former husband, he was not uptight but funny, expressive, and he enjoyed listening to her. He also had a fashionable disdain for materialism. The new man did not spurn her children and, in fact, doted on them. This was, though, a risky enterprise for the couple; at least one of them was on the rebound. It was, of course, Jasmine. However, she categorically denied that she was. In fact, she would tell anyone who listened to her that she had grown to despise her ex and couldn’t wait to start a new life with someone about whom she cared.

Jasmine and her new man decided to get married. She said that she could not be happy without a partner in her life. What happened in the four months after the wedding is anyone’s guess. Boredom, she affirmed, seeped into the couple’s relationship. Jasmine had thought that she would ride into the sunset and live happily ever after. Her enthusiasm and wishful thinking were obviously misplaced. The couple’s serene world started spinning out of control. If history were any guide, Jasmine’s new marriage had some shades of her first marriage. Her husband witnessed a completely sinister side of her. He constantly complained of being marginalized, she said. She was dismissive and indifferent. “Occasionally, I growled at him,” she admitted. “I am known for my quick-draw temper.” She avoided him as much as she could and treated him like a roommate.  “I was, in a sense, reliving my first marriage,” she said.  

A three-month separation ensued and then the inevitable happened.  After six months of marriage, her new husband filed for divorce. The word “divorce,” she said, pierced her like a blade. She was expecting a long, drawn-out conflict and reconciliation and not the dissolution of her marriage. Her family and friends, this time, were not surprised and, in fact, did not even whimper. They all knew that she was easy to love and admire but difficult to live with.

 Instead of the two actively seeking to rescue their tattered union, they went on the offensive to discredit each other. “I guess we were emotionally immature, too sensitive, and not level-headed,” she said, smiling. “I disrespected him and talked to him in a way I would not address my friends,” she said. “Honestly, I regret that.” Then she added a zinger, “But someone had to be the adult in that marriage,” a not-too-subtle shot at her second husband.

“I a m now single,” she told this writer. “My two former husbands are ‘happily’ married, I assume.” Her children are adults and preparing to move out of her house and start their own families.

Jasmine asked rhetorically, “Am I that bad of a person not to be happy?”

This is the end of Jasmine’s absorbing account of her marriages.

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Sonja Lyubomirsky’s book, The Myths of Happiness, interestingly answers some of the questions about happiness. The writer teaches psychology at the University of California, Riverside.  A new marriage, argues Lyubomirsky, brings a great deal of joy and intense happiness, but only for a short period. In a survey of 1761  European and American couples who have been married for longer than 15 years, respondents said that newlyweds enjoyed a period of heightened joy and happiness in the first two years but that joy started wearing off afterwards. Married couples, after that initial period, can recover that marital happiness 10 to 20 years later when the children leave home. The empty nest provides new opportunities for couples to rediscover each other and rekindle their love.

Why does the joy and intense happiness vaporize after a short period? Lyubomirsky introduces a concept that she calls “hedonic adaptation”; could it be the culprit? Hedonic adaptation means “human beings have the remarkable capacity to grow habituated or inured to most of life’s changes.” When things are familiar and constant, Lyubomirsky points out, humans, psychologically and physiologically, are notorious for taking positive experiences for granted. Every marriage is susceptible to hedonic adaptation. A new marriage that started with intense joy suddenly may turn into a life of routine existence and predictability. In fact, the author writes, that “we are prone to take for granted pretty much everything positive that happens to us.” The author writes that the thrill mostly goes away as quickly as it does when buying a new car or house because we begin to take the “new improved circumstance” for granted. Familiarity, Lyubomirsky says, may or may not breed contempt but research has proved that it breeds indifference. People’s expectations of the marriage might evolve, change, or expand. Indeed, Woody Allen once said that a relationship is like a shark; “If it does not move forward, it dies.”

When people fall in love, they experience an array of euphoric, amorous and passionate feelings. But over the years, the passionate love turns into compassionate love. Interestingly, what normally kills passionate love is predictability. On the other hand, the hallmarks of compassionate love are “deep affection, connection, and liking.” Lyubomirsky does not dismiss the viability of passionate love and argues that humans need both passionate love and compassionate love because the two complement each other: The first galvanizes us and lays the foundation for the new relationship, and the second is crucial for the nourishment of “a committed, stable partnership.”

 Lyubomirsky’s book shatters basic assumptions of happiness. Some of the myths of happiness are divided into two categories. The first is the notion that says, “I will be happy when— (fill in the blank).” I will be happy when I get married, or have children, or get the long-awaited promotion, or become wealthy. When we get what we want though and these things do not make us happy, we become frustrated and depressed. Then, the blame game kicks in. We question ourselves about whether something is wrong with us.

 

The second category of happiness myths is the following: “I can’t be happy when— (fill in the blank).” For instance, I can’t be happy when I am single, poor, or ill. Negative experiences, such as divorce, loss of employment, and death, freak us out and invite self-doubt and downturns. We contemplate that we will never be happy again.  Paradoxically, what we call “crisis” can be veiled opportunities for “renewal, growth, or meaningful change.” Many times, adversity “toughens us up” and people who have weathered negative experiences tend to be happier than the ones who have not. In essence, positive and negative events are intricately linked. As the English poet William Blake said in Auguries of Innocence, “Joe and woe are woven fine.” Lyubomirsky raises the question that if we were asked the best thing and the worst thing that happened to us last year, the answer might surprise us because “it is often one and the same.” We may have lost a loved one last year but, in that same year, we also may have met a soul mate. Or, we may have lost a job and then regrouped and found a more interesting field of employment. 

To Lyubomirsky, popular culture has been feeding us myths that happiness means marriage, wealth, and fame. In fact, the author argues that happiness is “neither a destination nor an acquisition.” People are happier when:

a)      They invest in their relationships and pay attention to each other.

b)      They redirect things that matter instead of what does not.

c)      They are not desirous compared to others.

d)      They are thrifty.

e)      They express gratitude regularly about their relationships, life and health.

f)       They bring variety and surprise to their marriage and do not settle on a routine and dull existence.

g)      They have reliable friends to talk to and lean on.

h)      Couples have an open line of communication,

i)       They have the right attitude in dealing with life’s challenges, and know what they can’t control.

j)       They focus on the positives.

On the issue of attention, another author, Gretchen Rubin, who wrote Happier at Home (2012), adds an interesting caveat about what makes a couple’s relationship thrive: warm greetings and farewells. If a spouse gives a heartfelt greeting when his or her significant other comes home instead of a perfunctory greeting and the same when the spouse is leaving home, the act shows engagement and attentiveness.

 Happiness, if only Jasmine knew, is something that “resides inside us, not outside.” It is never achieving a mythical goal. Certainly, as Lyubomirsky remarks, “nothing in life is as joy-producing or as misery-inducing as we think.” When all is said and done, nothing makes us happy all the time.

For example, researchers at the University of British Columbia found that people who spend money “pro-socially,” which means spending it on gifts for others and charitable donations, are happier.

Finally, the American actress Goldie Hawn once wrote a memoir, The Lotus Grows in the Mud (2005), about her years in Hollywood where fame and wealth are intertwined. She said that she believed she would be happy once she made it in the film industry. On the contrary, she discovered that it was not the case. But she had learned a valuable lesson. “I think I had to become successful to understand that success enhances who you are,” she wrote. “People who are nasty become nastier. People who are happy become happier. People who are mean hoard their money and live in fear for the rest of their lives that they will lose it. People who are generous use their gifts to help people and try to make the world a better place.”