The Happiness Project (6 page)

Although a “fake it till you feel it” strategy sounded hokey, I found it extremely effective. When I felt draggy, I started to act with more energy. I sped up my walk. I paced while talking on the phone. I put more warmth and zest into my voice. Sometimes I feel exhausted by the prospect of spending time with my own children, but one tired afternoon, instead of trying to devise a game that involved my lying on the couch (I’ve managed to be astonishingly resourceful in coming up with ideas), I bounded into the room and said, “Hey, let’s play in the tent!” It really worked; I did manage to give myself an energy boost by acting with energy.

By the end of January, I was off to a promising start, but did I feel happier? It was too soon to tell. I did feel more alert and calm, and although I still had periods when I felt overtaxed, they became less frequent.

I found that rewarding myself for good behavior—even when that reward was nothing more than a check mark that I gave myself on my Resolutions Chart—made it easier for me to stick to a resolution. Getting a bit of reinforcement did make a difference. I could see, however, that I’d have to remind myself continually to keep my resolutions. In particular, I noticed a decline in my order-maintaining zeal by the end of the month. I loved the big payoff of cleaning out a closet, but keeping the apartment tidy was a Sisyphean task that never stayed finished. Perhaps the “one-minute rule” and the “evening tidy-up” would keep me attacking clutter regularly, in small doses, so that it couldn’t grow to its previous crushing proportions.

Nevertheless, I was astonished by the charge of energy and satisfaction I got from creating order. The closet that had been an eyesore was now a joy; the stack of papers slowly yellowing on the edge of my desk was gone. “It is by studying
little things,
” wrote Samuel Johnson, “that we attain the great art of having as little misery, and as much happiness as possible.”

Remember Love

M
ARRIAGE

Quit nagging.

Don’t expect praise or appreciation.

Fight right.

No dumping.

Give proofs of love.

O
ne alarming fact jumps out from the research about happiness and marriage: marital satisfaction drops substantially after the first child arrives. The disruptive presence of new babies and teenagers, in particular, puts a lot of pressure on marriages, and discontent spikes when children are in these stages.

Jamie and I had been married for eleven years, and sure enough, the incidence of low-level bickering in our marriage increased significantly after our daughter Eliza was born. Until then, the phrase “Can’t
you
do it?” had never crossed my lips. Over the last several years, I’d started doing too much
complaining, nagging, and foot-dragging. It was time to do something about that.

As corny as it sounds, I’ve always felt that from the moment we were introduced in the library during law school, when I was a first-year and he was a second-year, Jamie and I have had an extraordinary love (the rose-colored pile jacket he was wearing that afternoon still hangs at the back of my closet). In recent years, though, I’d begun to worry that an accumulation of minor irritations and sharp words was making us less outwardly loving.

Our marriage wasn’t in trouble. We showed our affection openly and often. We were indulgent with each other. We handled conflict pretty well. We didn’t practice the behaviors that the marriage expert John Gottman calls the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” for their destructive role in relationships: stonewalling, defensiveness, criticism, and contempt. Well, sometimes we indulged in stonewalling, defensiveness, and criticism, but
never
contempt, the worst behavior of all.

But we—
I
—had fallen into some bad habits that I wanted to change.

Working on my marriage was an obvious goal for my happiness project, because a good marriage is one of the factors most strongly associated with happiness. Partly this reflects the fact that happy people find it easier to get and stay married than unhappy people do, because happy people make better dates and easier spouses. But marriage itself also brings happiness, because it provides the support and companionship that everyone needs.

For me, as for most married people, my marriage was the foundation of all the other important choices in my life: where I lived, having kids, my friends, my work, my leisure. The atmosphere of my marriage set the weather for my whole life. That’s why I’d decided not only to include marriage in my happiness project but also to tackle it early, in the second month.

Yet though my relationship with Jamie was the most important factor in shaping my daily existence, it was also, unfortunately, the relationship in
which I was most likely to behave badly. Too often I focused on gripes and disputes, and I did quite a bit of blaming. If the lightbulbs were burned out, if I was feeling plagued by a messy apartment, or even if I felt discouraged about my work, I blamed Jamie.

Jamie is a funny mix. He has a sardonic side that can make him seem distant and almost harsh to people who don’t know him well, but he’s also very tender-hearted. (A good example: he loves movies that I find unbearably dark, such as
Open Water
and
Reservoir Dogs,
but he also loves sweet, sentimental movies—his favorite is
Say Anything.
) He drives me crazy by refusing to carry out various husbandly assignments, then surprises me by upgrading my computer without my asking. He makes the bed but never uses the clothes hamper. He’s bad at buying presents for birthdays, but he brings home lovely gifts unexpectedly. Like everyone, he’s a combination of good and not-so-good qualities, and the worst of my bad habits was to focus on his faults while taking his virtues for granted.

I had come to understand one critical fact about my happiness project: I couldn’t change anyone else. As tempting as it was to try, I couldn’t lighten the atmosphere of our marriage by bullying Jamie into changing his ways. I could work only on myself. For inspiration, I turned to the twelfth of my Twelve Commandments: “There is only love.”

A friend of mine was the source of that commandment. She came up with the phrase when she was considering taking a high-pressure job where she’d be working for a notoriously difficult person. The person handling the hiring process told her, “I’m going to be honest with you. John Doe is very effective, but he’s an extremely tough guy to work for. Think hard about whether you want this job.” My friend really wanted the job, so she decided,
“There is only love.”
From that moment on, she refused to think critical thoughts about John Doe; she never complained about him behind his back; she wouldn’t even listen to other people criticize him.

“Don’t your coworkers think you’re a goody-goody?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” she said. “They all wish they could do the same thing, too. He drives them crazy, but I can honestly say that I like John.”

If my friend could do that for her boss, why couldn’t I do it for Jamie? Deep down, I had only love for Jamie—but I was allowing too many petty issues to get in the way. I wasn’t living up to my own standards of behavior, and then, because I felt guilty when I behaved badly, I behaved even worse.

Love is a funny thing. I’d donate a kidney to Jamie without a moment’s hesitation, but I was intensely annoyed if he asked me to make a special stop at the drugstore to pick up shaving cream. Studies show that the most common sources of conflict among couples are money, work, sex, communication, religion, children, in-laws, appreciation, and leisure activities. Having a newborn is also particularly tough. However, these categories—as seemingly all-inclusive as they were—didn’t quite capture my problem areas. I thought hard about my particular marriage, and the changes I could make to restore the tenderness and patience of our newlywed, prebaby days.

First, I needed to change my approach to household work. I was spending too much time handing out assignments and nagging, and not only was I nagging Jamie to do his work, I was nagging him to give me praise for
my
work. Also, I wanted to become more lighthearted, especially in moments of anger. A line by G. K. Chesterton echoed in my head: “It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light” (or, as the saying goes, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard”). And I wanted to stop taking Jamie for granted. Small, frequent gestures of thoughtfulness were more important than flowers on Valentine’s Day, and I wanted to load Jamie with small treats and courtesies, praise and appreciation—after all, as my Secret of Adulthood holds, “What you do
every day
matters more than what you do
once in a while.
”

Jamie didn’t ask me what experiments I’d planned for the month, and I didn’t tell him. I knew him well enough to know that although he realized that, in some ways, he was my lab rat, hearing about the details would make him feel self-conscious.

These resolutions were going to be tough for me—I knew that. I wasn’t unrealistic enough to expect to be able to keep every resolution, every day,
but I wanted to aim higher than I had. One reason I started my happiness project by raising my energy and clearing my clutter was that I knew I’d be more able to act lighthearted and loving if I didn’t feel overwhelmed by mental or physical disorder. It seemed ridiculous, but already, having a tidier closet and getting more sleep was putting me into a happier and more peaceable frame of mind. The challenge would be to keep up with January’s resolutions now that I was adding a new list of resolutions for February.

QUIT NAGGING.

Jamie hated being nagged, and I hated
being
a nag, yet I found myself doing it all too often. Studies show that the quality of a couple’s friendship determines, in large part, whether they feel satisfied with their marriage’s romance and passion, and nothing kills the feeling of friendship (and passion) more than nagging. Anyway, nagging doesn’t work.

Our Valentine’s cards gave me a chance to put this resolution to a test. As happens to many people, about five minutes after Eliza was born, I was possessed with an irresistible urge to send out yearly holiday cards. In a decision born more out of desperation rather than originality, I’d decided to make a tradition of sending cards in February for Valentine’s Day, instead of in December, when life is crazy.

When it was time to send out the cards this year, as Jamie and I sat down to watch
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
I got out the enormous stacks of envelopes and asked brightly, “Would you like to stuff or seal?”

He gave me a sad look and said, “Please don’t make me.”

I struggled to decide how to answer. Should I insist that he help? Should I tell him that it wasn’t fair that I had to do all the work? That I’d done the hard part of ordering the cards and arranging for the photo (an adorable picture of Eleanor and Eliza in ballet clothes), and he was just helping with the easy part? On the other hand, I’d decided to do these
cards to suit myself. Was it fair to ask him to help? Well, fairness didn’t really matter. I’d rather finish the envelopes myself than feel like a nag.