The Happiness Project

by Gretchen Rubin

  One day when I repeatedly failed to fight right helped me to see this point clearly. For Presidents Day weekend, we went on a little vacation with Jamie’s parents. My in-laws, Judy and Bob, are wonderful grandparents with whom to vacation—helpful, easygoing, with a reasonable tolerance for chaos—but they like to have plenty of time when traveling, and in our rush to get out the door to meet them, I let myself get too hungry. Just as we were leaving the apartment, I realized I was famished, and I gave myself a quick fix by digging into an enormous heart-shaped box of M&M’s that Eliza had gotten for Valentine’s Day.

  Eating all that candy made me feel guilty and a little sick, and I couldn’t keep from making nasty remarks. The worse I behaved, the guiltier I felt, and that made me behave worse.

  “Jamie, please get those papers out of my way.”

  “Eliza, stop leaning on me, you’re hurting my arm.”

  “Jamie, can’t you get that bag?”

  Even after we arrived at the hotel, having made a wrong start, I couldn’t shake my bad feelings.

  “Are you okay?” Jamie asked me at one point.

  “Sure, I’m fine,” I mumbled, temporarily chastened, but my bad mood soon reasserted itself.

  That night, after Eliza and Eleanor went to sleep, the adults could finally have a sustained conversation. We drank our after-dinner coffee (even after years as part of this family, I still marvel at Judy’s and Bob’s ability to drink espresso with caffeine after dinner) and talked about a recent New York Times article about VX-950, a hepatitis C drug in trials.

  We cared a lot about those trials. Jamie jokes about being a “broken toy” with his bad knee, his impressive scar from childhood surgery, and occasional back spasms, but his major broken part is his liver. He has hepatitis C.

  As chronic and potentially fatal conditions go, hepatitis C has some good points. It’s not contagious except through direct blood contact. Jamie has no apparent symptoms and found out that he has hepatitis C only through a blood test. One day he’ll develop cirrhosis and his liver will stop functioning and he’ll be in very big trouble, but for now, he’s perfectly fine. Also, when it comes to health problems, misery loves company; if a lot of people share your ailment, drug companies work hard to find a cure. About 3 million people in the United States have hepatitis C, along with 170 million or so worldwide, so it’s an active area of research, and Jamie’s doctors estimate that new, effective treatments are likely to be approved within five to eight years. Hepatitis C has a very long course—of the people who develop cirrhosis, most don’t get it for twenty or thirty years.

  Thirty years sounds like a very long time, but Jamie picked up hepatitis C through a blood transfusion during a heart operation when he was eight years old, before screening for hepatitis C began. And now he’s thirty-eight.

  The one treatment now available, pegylated interferon plus ribavirin, didn’t work for Jamie, despite an unpleasant year of flulike symptoms, pills, and weekly shots. Now we just have to hope that Jamie manages to hang on to his liver until researchers find new treatments. In addition to cirrhosis leading to liver failure, itself not an attractive prospect, hepatitis C also makes liver cancer far more likely. Thank goodness for liver transplants—though a transplanted liver is no picnic and, scarily, not always possible to get. (Like the old joke about the restaurant: “The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small.”)

  So we were all very interested in the Times piece’s description of possible new treatments. My father-in-law, Bob, found the article encouraging, but every time he made a comment, I countered it.

  “According to the article, the research is very promising,” he said.

  “But both of Jamie’s liver doctors told us that it’s going to be at least five years, if not more, for a drug to be approved,” I answered.

  “The article suggests that they’re making great strides,” he answered mildly. Bob never becomes argumentative.

  “But they’re still a very long way from getting it on the market.” I often become argumentative.

  “This field of research is enormously active.”

  “But the time horizon is very long.”

  Etc., etc., etc.

  It’s not often that I find myself telling Bob that he’s being overly optimistic. He emphasizes the importance of rational, probabilistic decision making, and he practices this discipline himself, with yellow notepads with “pros” and “cons” columns, a habit of gathering multiple viewpoints, a detached “Markets go up, markets go down” outlook. In this situation, however, he chose to take an optimistic view of the evidence. Why argue with him? I didn’t agree with his view, but I’m no doctor, what did I know?

  My new aspirations for my behavior were high but not unreasonable. I knew that my combativeness and pedantry in this conversation came not from petty irritation but from a desire to protect myself against false hopes. Bob was taking the positive route, and I would have felt better if I’d let the issue go without arguing. I’m sure I made Bob, and certainly Jamie, feel worse by saying discouraging things, and being quarrelsome just made me feel bad. Fight right—not just with your husband but with everyone.

  On a less lofty note, I also learned not to eat half a pound of M&M’s on an empty stomach.

  NO DUMPING.

  For my research on learning how to “Fight right,” I had acquired an extensive library of books on marriage and relationships.

  “Anyone who looks at our shelves is going to think that our marriage is in trouble,” Jamie observed.

  “Why’s that?” I asked, startled.

  “Look what you’ve got here. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Love Is Never Enough. Babyproofing Your Marriage. Uncoupling. One Man, Hurt. I’d be worried myself if I didn’t know what you were working on.”

  “But this material is great,” I said. “There’s so much fascinating research.”

  “Sure, but people don’t bother to read these books unless they have issues.”

  Maybe Jamie was right, but I was happy that I’d had a reason to study the latest findings about marriage and relationships. I’d learned a lot. For example, there’s an intriguing difference in how men and women approach intimacy. Although men and women agree that sharing activities and self-disclosure are important, women’s idea of an intimate moment is a face-to-face conversation, while men feel close when they work or play sitting alongside someone.

  So when Jamie asked, “Do you want to watch The Shield?” I understood that in his eyes, watching TV together counted as true quality time, not we’re-just-sitting-in-a-room-watching-TV-not-talking-to-each-other time.

  “Great idea!” I answered. And, as it turned out, while lying in bed watching a TV show about a rogue cop in L.A. didn’t sound very romantic, it felt romantic once we were cozily settled in against the pillows.

  Perhaps because men have this low standard for what qualifies as intimacy, both men and women find relationships with women to be more intimate and enjoyable than those with men. Women have more feelings of empathy for other people than men do (though women and men have about the same degree of empathy for animals, whatever that means). In fact, for both men and women—and this finding struck me as highly significant—the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a difference.

  Learning about this research made a difference in my attitude toward Jamie. I love him with all my heart, and I know he loves me, and I know that I can absolutely trust and confide in him, yet I often felt frustrated because he never wanted to have long heart-to-heart discussions. In particular, I wished that he would take more interest in my work. My sister, Elizabeth, is a TV writer, and I envy her having her writing partner, Sarah. Practically daily, she and Sarah have marathon conversations about their writing and career strategies. I don’t have a partner or any colleagues with whom to discuss work issues, so I wanted Jamie to fill that role for me.

  Also, I expected to be
able to dump all my insecurities into Jamie’s lap. I’d start conversations with enticing openers such as “I’m worried that I’m not living up to my potential” or “I’m doing a bad job of networking” or “What if my writing is no good?” Jamie, remarkably, didn’t want to have these conversations, and that made me angry. I wanted him to help me work through my feelings of anxiety and self-doubt.

  Learning that men and women both turn to women for understanding showed me that Jamie wasn’t ignoring me out of lack of interest or affection; he just wasn’t good at giving that kind of support. Jamie wasn’t going to have a long discussion about whether I should start a blog or how I should structure my book. He didn’t want to spend hours pumping up my self-confidence. He was never going to play the role of a female writing partner, and it wasn’t realistic to expect him to do it. If I needed that kind of support, I should figure out another way to get it. My realization didn’t change his behavior—but I stopped feeling so resentful.

  I’d also noticed that the more upset I felt, the less Jamie seemed to want to talk about it.

  “You know,” I said to him one night, “I’m feeling anxious. I wish you’d try to help me feel better. The worse I feel, the less you seem to want to talk to me.”

  “I just can’t stand to see you unhappy,” he answered.

  Light again dawned. It wasn’t perversity that kept Jamie from being a sympathetic listener; not only was he constitutionally less oriented to having long heart-to-heart conversations, he also tried to avoid any topic that got me upset, because he found it so painful to see me feeling blue. Now, that didn’t let him off the hook altogether—sometimes I needed a sympathetic listener, even if he didn’t feel like playing that role—but at least I understood his perspective.

  Our conversation started me thinking about how my happiness affected Jamie and others. I’d heard the aphorism “Happy wife, happy life” or, put another way, “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” At first I’d thought that sounded great—yippee, it’s all about pleasing me!—but if these sayings are true, it’s a tremendous responsibility.

  I’d wondered whether my happiness project was selfish, because it seemed self-indulgent to concentrate on my own happiness. True, I do make other people happy when I tend to my own happiness—I was trying not to snap at Jamie and to laugh at his jokes. But it went beyond that. By being happy myself, I was better able to try to make other people happier.

  Happy people generally are more forgiving, helpful, and charitable, have better self-control, and are more tolerant of frustration than unhappy people, while unhappy people are more often withdrawn, defensive, antagonistic, and self-absorbed. Oscar Wilde observed, “One is not always happy when one is good; but one is always good when one is happy.”

  Happiness has a particularly strong influence in marriage, because spouses pick up each other’s moods so easily. A 30 percent increase in one spouse’s happiness boosts the other spouse’s happiness, while a drop in one spouse’s happiness drags the other down. (Not only that: I was fascinated to learn that in a phenomenon known as “health concordance,” partners’ health behaviors tend to merge, as they pick up good or bad habits from each other related to eating, exercising, visiting doctors, smoking, and drinking.)

  I know that Jamie wants me to be happy. In fact, the happier I seem to be, the more Jamie tries to make me happy, and when I’m unhappy—for whatever reason—Jamie goes into a funk. So, as part of my attempt to be happy, I resolved, “No dumping,” especially on Jamie. I would bring up my worries if I really needed Jamie’s counsel or support, but I wouldn’t dump my minor troubles on him.

  I had an opportunity to live up to my resolution one Sunday morning. It was a rare moment of calm. Jamie was cleaning up the mess he’d created while whipping up pancakes, Eliza was absorbed in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Eleanor was covering every page of a Scooby-Doo coloring book with green crayon, and I was going through the mail. I opened an innocent-looking letter from our credit card company to discover that because of a security breach on its end, our main credit card had been canceled, and we’d been issued a new card and number.

  I was furious. Now I’d have to go into every account that relied on that credit card number to update it. I hadn’t kept a list, so I had no idea how I was going to figure out which accounts needed to be changed. Our automatic toll pass, our Amazon account, my gym membership…what else? The statement was so matter-of-fact too; no apology, no little perk to acknowledge the corporate fault or the inconvenience to cardholders. This was the kind of chore that made me crazy: it took up precious time and mental energy, yet when it was done, I was no better off than before I started it.

  “I can’t believe this!” I fumed to Jamie. “They’ve canceled our credit card because of their mistake!” I was prepared to launch into a full diatribe when the thought flashed through my mind: “No dumping.” I paused. Why should I spoil a peaceful moment with my irritation? Hearing someone complain is tiresome whether you’re in a good mood or a bad one and whether or not the complaining is justified. I took a deep breath and stopped in mid-rant. “Oh, well” was all I said, in a tone of forced calm.

  Jamie looked at me with surprise, then relief. He probably knew what an effort it had taken for me to restrain myself. When I got up to get more coffee, he stood up to give me a hug, without saying anything.

  GIVE PROOFS OF LOVE.

  I’ve never forgotten something I read in college, by Pierre Reverdy: “There is no love; there are only proofs of love.” Whatever love I might feel in my heart, others will see only my actions.

  When I looked back at my Resolutions Chart, I could see that some entries, such as “Toss, restore, organize” boasted a row of cheerful check marks, while other resolutions were dotted with X marks. I was doing a lot better with “Go to sleep earlier” than with “Don’t expect praise or appreciation.” Fortunately, “Give proofs of love” seemed like the kind of action that could easily become a pleasant habit.

  Some ways of showing my love were easy. Because people are 47 percent (how do they come up with these statistics?) more apt to feel close to a family member who often expresses affection than to one who rarely does, I started telling Jamie “I love you” at every turn and putting “ILY” at the end of my e-mails. I also started hugging Jamie more—as well as other people in my life. Hugging relieves stress, boosts feelings of closeness, and even squelches pain. In one study, people assigned to give five hugs each day for a month, aiming to hug as many different people as they could, became happier.

  Some things I was already doing right. Because I didn’t want every one of my e-mails to Jamie to contain some irksome question or reminder, I’d gotten into the habit of sending him enjoyable messages, with interesting news or funny stories about the girls.

  One day when I walked by Jamie’s office building in midtown on my way to a meeting, I stopped to call him on my cell phone.

  “Are you at your desk?” I asked.

  “Yes, why?”

  “Look down at the steps of St. Bartholomew’s.” The church was right across the street from Jamie’s office. “Do you see me waving to you?”

  “Yes, look, there you are! I’m waving back.”

  Taking the time to give that silly, affectionate wave filled me with good feelings that lasted for hours.

  These were small gestures, but they made a surprisingly big shift in the tone of our interactions. I had an opportunity to make a larger gesture, too, because my mother-in-law, Judy, had a significant birthday coming up.

  Parents and in-laws play a big part in our lives. My parents, Karen and Jack Craft, live in Kansas City, where I grew up, but one or both of my parents visit every few months, and we go to Kansas City to stay with them at least twice a year. These visits are of the intense, what-should-we-all-do-today? variety. Jamie’s parents live just around the corner. Literally. There’s one lone skinny town house between their apartment building and our apartment building. When we’re walking aro
und the neighborhood, we often see them heading toward us, on their way to get coffee or to stop by the market—Judy with her silver hair and beautiful scarves, Bob with his stiff gait and wool cap.

  Fortunately for our marriage, Jamie and I agree on the importance of our relationships with our two sets of parents, so it was natural for me to be thinking about Judy’s birthday. If we’d asked Judy how she’d like to celebrate, she would have said she didn’t care. However, if you want to know how people would like to be treated, it’s more helpful to look at how they themselves act than what they say. Judy is one of the most reliable people I’ve ever met; she never forgets an obligation, fails to do something she says she’ll do, or misses an important date. And though she insists that exchanging birthday or holiday gifts isn’t important to her, no one gives more thoughtful and beautifully wrapped presents. She even gives us wedding-anniversary presents that track the traditional theme for each year: for our fourth, “fruits and flowers” anniversary, she gave us a beautiful quilt with a fruits and flowers design; for our tenth, “tin/aluminum” anniversary, she gave us ten boxes of aluminum foil.

  Jamie, his father, and his brother, Phil, aren’t good at planning birthday celebrations. In the past, I would have made a few reminder comments as Judy’s birthday loomed, nagged at Jamie to make plans, then had a smug I-told-you-so attitude when the birthday wasn’t celebrated properly. My happiness project work hadn’t all been in vain, however, and I saw the solution to the problem: I would take charge.

  I knew the kind of party Judy would like. She definitely wouldn’t want a surprise party, and she’d prefer a family party at home. She valued thoughtfulness far more than lavishness, so homemade gifts that showed forethought would mean more to her than anything store-bought, and she’d like a home-cooked meal more than dinner in a fancy restaurant. Fortunately, my brother-in-law, Phil, and his wife, Lauren, are gifted chefs who run a catering company, so a meal could be both home-cooked and fancy.