▪ Quit nagging.
▪ Don’t expect praise or appreciation.
▪ Fight right.
▪ No dumping.
▪ Give proofs of love.
One 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.
“It’s okay,” I told him with a sigh. “Don’t worry about it.” I did feel a few twinges of resentment when I glanced at Jamie lounging back on the sofa, but I realized that I enjoyed not feeling like a nag more than I enjoyed watching TV without licking envelopes at the same time.
After the movie, Jamie looked over at me, where I sat surrounded by stuffed, sealed, and stamped red envelopes.
He put his hand on mine. “Will you be my Valentine?”
I was glad that I’d decided not to push it.
To make it easier to quit nagging, I made myself a checklist of antinagging techniques. First, because it’s annoying to hear a hectoring voice, I found ways for us to suggest tasks without talking; when I put an envelope on the floor by the front door, Jamie knew he was supposed to mail it on his way to work. I limited myself to a one-word reminder. Instead of barking out, “Now remember, you promised to figure out what’s wrong with the video camera before we go to the park!” I just said, “Camera!” as Jamie got up from lunch. I reminded myself that tasks didn’t need to be done according to my schedule. I had to fight the urge to nag Jamie to retrieve the play slide from our basement storage, because once I decided Eleanor would enjoy it, I wanted it brought up immediately. But it wasn’t really urgent. I did give myself credit for not indulging in the popular “It’s for your own good” variety of nagging. I never bugged Jamie about taking an umbrella, eating breakfast, or going to the dentist. Although some people think that that kind of nagging shows love, I think that an adult should be able to decide whether or not to wear a sweater without interference from others.
The most obvious (and least appealing) antinagging technique, of course, was to do a task myself. Why did I get to decree that it was Jamie’s responsibility to make sure we had plenty of cash on hand? Once I took over the job, we always had cash, and I was much happier. And when Jamie did a task, I didn’t allow myself to carp from the sidelines. I thought he paid too much when he bought the replacement for the dud video camera, but it was his decision to make in his own way.
I also tried to be more observant and appreciative of all the tasks that Jamie did. I was certainly guilty of “unconscious overclaiming,” the phenomenon in which we unconsciously overestimate our contributions or skills relative to other people. (It’s related to the Garrison Keillor–named “Lake Wobegon fallacy,” which describes the fact that we all fancy ourselves to be above average.) In one study, when students in a work group each estimated their contribution to the team, the total was 139 percent. This makes sense, because we’re far more aware of what we do than what other people do: I complain about the time I spend paying bills, but I overlook the time Jamie spends dealing with our car.
I have a friend who has a radical solution. She and her husband don’t assign. Even though they have four children, they have a tacit agreement never to say things such as “You need to take the kids to the birthday party” or “Fix the toilet, it’s running again.” Their system works because they both pitch in, but even so, I can’t imagine living that way. It’s an impossible ideal, yet inspiring.
DON’T EXPECT PRAISE OR APPRECIATION.
My examination of my nagging habit showed me that I also engaged in a more subtle form of nagging—nagging that concerned work that I did. I nagged Jamie to give me more praise.
With something like the Valentine’s cards project, I realized that what I really wanted—even more than help—was for Jamie to say something such as “Wow, the photograph of the girls is terrific! You’re doing a great job with these Valentine’s cards!” I wanted that gold star stuck onto my homework.
Why did I have such a need for gold stars? Was it vanity that needed to be stoked? Was it insecurity that needed to be soothed? Whatever the reason, I knew I should get over my need for Jamie to applaud the nice things I did, and, even more, I should get over my need for Jamie even to notice the nice things I did. So I made the resolution “Don’t expect praise or appreciation.”
Until I started paying close attention, I hadn’t appreciated how much this need affected my behavior. One morning, I staggered into the kitchen in my robe around 7:30 A.M. I’d been up for much of the night with Eleanor, who had hardly slept; Jamie had got up with her around 6:00 so I could go back to bed.
“Good morning,” I mumbled as I cracked open a Diet Coke. I didn’t add any words of thanks for my luxurious extra ninety minutes of sleep.
Jamie waited a moment, then prompted, “I hope you appreciate that I bought you some time this morning.” He needs gold stars himself, even though he isn’t very good—to my mind—at handing them out.
I’d been concentrating about behaving better in my marriage. I’d been patting myself on the back for learning so much. So did I say in a tender voice, “Of course I appreciate it, thanks so much, you’re my hero”? Did I give Jamie a big hug of gratitude? Nope. Because Jamie neglected to give me a gold star for staying up with Eleanor, I snapped, “I did appreciate it, but you never show any appreciation when I let you sleep. Then you expect a lot of gratitude when you let me sleep.” Jamie’s look made me wish I’d reacted differently. I remembered my Ninth Commandment: “Lighten up.”
I put my arms around him. “I’m sorry. Really. I shouldn’t have talked that way, and I do appreciate getting the extra sleep this morning.”
“You know,” he said, “I really was trying to give you a treat. And I do appreciate the fact that you let me sleep.”
“Okay.”
We hugged—for at least six seconds, which, I happened to know from my research, is the minimum time necessary to promote the flow of oxytocin and serotonin, mood-boosting chemicals that promote bonding. The moment of tension passed.
This exchange led me to an important insight into how to manage myself better. I’d been self-righteously telling myself that I did certain chores or made certain efforts “for Jamie” or “for the team.” Though this sounded generous, it led to a bad result, because I sulked when Jamie didn’t appreciate my efforts. Instead, I started to tell myself, “I’m doing this for myself. This is what I want.” I wanted to send out Valentine’s cards. I wanted to clean out the kitchen cabinets. This sounded selfish, but in fact, it was less selfish, because it meant I wasn’t nagging to get a gold star from Jamie or anyone else. No one else even had to notice what I’d done.
I remember talking to a friend whose parents had been very involved in the civil rights movement. “They always said,” he told me, “that you have to do that kind of work for yourself. If you do it for other people, you end up wanting them to acknowledge it and to be grateful and to give you credit. If you do it for yourself, you don’t expect other people to react in a particular way.” I think that’s right.
Nevertheless, for all my talk of giving up gold stars, I have to admit that I still thought it would be nice for Jamie to hand them out a bit more lavishly. Whether or not I should want them, I do.
FIGHT RIGHT.
Nagging was easier to address than some other behaviors I was trying to change. I faced a tougher challenge with my second priority: lightening my attitude. Marital conflicts fall into two categories: issues that can be clearly resolved and those that can’t. Unfortunately, more conflicts fall into the open-ended “How should we spend our money?” and “How should we raise our children?” categories than into the easier “What movie should we see this weekend?” or “Where should we go on our vacation this summer?” category.
Some disagreement is inevitable and even valuable. Since Jamie and I were going to fight, I wanted to be able to have fights that were more fun, where we could joke around and be affectionate even while we were disagreeing.
I also wanted to conquer my own particular bosom enemy: snapping. Far too often, in a kind of one-sided minifight, I would lash out in sudden fits of temper that soured the household mood. I’d often wondered why anger—along with pride, greed, gluttony, lust, sloth, and envy—were the seven deadly sins, because they didn’t seem as deadly as lots of other sins. It turns out that they’re deadly sins not because of their gravity but because of their power to generate other, worse sins. They’re the gateway sins to the big sins. Of the seven deadly sins, anger was certainly my nemesis.
Fighting style is very important to the health of a marriage; Gottman’s “love laboratory” research shows that how a couple fights matters more than how much they fight. Couples who fight right tackle only one difficult topic at a time, instead of indulging in arguments that cover every grievance since the first date. These couples ease into arguments instead of blowing up immediately—and avoid bombs such as “You never . . .” and “You always . . .” They know how to bring an argument to an end, instead of keeping it going for hours. They make “repair attempts” by using words or actions to keep bad feelings from escalating. They recognize other pressures imposed on a spouse—a husband acknowledges that his wife feels overwhelmed by the demands of work and home; a wife acknowledges that her husband feels caught between her and his mother.
Here’s an example of how not to fight right. Apparently, much as I hate to acknowledge it, I may snore from time to time. I hate to hear any mention of it, because snoring sounds so unattractive, but when Jamie joked about it one morning, I was trying to “be light,” so I laughed along with him.
Then, a few weeks later, as we were listening to our favorite all-news radio station before the 6:30 alarm rang and I was reflecting groggily on how much more peaceful our bedroom was now that I’d cleared away so much mess, Jamie said in a sweet, kidding-around way, “I’ll start the day with two observations. First, you snore.”
I snapped. “So that’s the first thing I have to hear in the morning?” I exploded. I practically threw the covers in his face as I got out of bed. “That I snore. Can you think of nothing nicer to say?” I stormed across the room and started yanking clothes out of the closet. “If you want me to stop, give me a poke while I’m sleeping, but don’t keep harping on it!”
Lesson learned? By laughing along with him, I’d made Jamie think that snoring was a good subject for a joke. I tried to be light, but I couldn’t; I wish I could always laugh at myself easily, but in some situations, I can’t, and I should have responded honestly, so I could avoid an eventual blowup. Jamie had had no warning that his comment was going to enrage me. So much for “Fight right.” This time, I hadn’t managed to keep my resolution—I couldn’t even bring myself to apologize, I just wanted to forget about it—but next time, I’d do better (I hoped).
In marriage, it’s less important to have many pleasant experiences than it is to have fewer unpleasant experiences, because people have a “negativity bias”; our reactions to bad events are faster, stronger, and stickier than our reactions to good events. In fact, in practically every language, there are more concepts to describe negative emotions than positive emotions.
It takes at least five positive marital actions to offset one critical or destructive action, so one way to strengthen a marriage is to make sure that the positive far outweighs the negative. When a couple’s interactions are usually loving and kind, it’s much easier to disregard the occasional unpleasant exchange. I had a feeling, however, that it would take more than five marital actions, on both our parts, to offset the negative force of our snoring exchange.
Fighting right made a big difference to my happiness, because the failure to fight right was a significant source of guilt in my life. As Mark Twain observed, “An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.” When Jamie did something annoying and I snapped at him, and then I felt bad about snapping, I blamed it on him. But in fact, I realized, a major cause of my bad feelings wasn’t Jamie’s behavior but rather my guilt about my reaction to his behavior; fighting right eliminated that guilt and so made me happier.
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 around 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.
A vision came to me as if in a dream; then I needed authority to execute it.
I called my father-in-law at the office. “Hi, Bob. I’m calling to talk about plans for Judy’s birthday.”
“That’s a little far off, don’t you think?”
“Not really, not if we want to plan something special. And I think we should.”
Pause.
“Well,” he said slowly, “I’d been thinking—”
“Because I have an idea, if you’d like to hear what I think might be fun.”
“Oh yes,” he said with relief, “what do you have in mind?”
Bob immediately signed on to my plan. He’s a very good sport about dealing with many kinds of tiresome family tasks and obligations, but this kind of project didn’t play to his strengths. In fact, everyone in the family cooperated happily. They wanted Judy to have a wonderful birthday, too; they just weren’t inclined to do the kind of planning it would require.
In pursuit of my vision, I took complete control. A few days before the party, I sent around an e-mail to Jamie, Bob, Phil, and Lauren—and, to their credit, I didn’t get a single snarky e-mail in response:
Hello all—Judy’s birthday party is just four days away.
We want a PILE of WRAPPED presents. This means you! One is not enough!
Bob: Eliza and I wrapped your present. Are you bringing champagne?
Jamie: have you bought the present from you and me?
Phil and Lauren: what are you making for dinner—is there anything special I need to have on hand? what time do you need to arrive? white wine or red wine with the food? Did you say you were making menu cards? I think Judy would think that was hilarious.
Everyone: I know I’d open myself up for family scorn if I instructed everyone that it was inappropriate to wear your I-just-rolled-off-the-couch-to-amble-over-to-your-party clothes. So I won’t say a word about that. Just remember that it is the sense of occasion and thoughtfulness that will make it a great night.
This will be fun! xx g
I did a lot of preparation for this party. Eliza and I went to the “Our Name Is Mud” pottery store, where Eliza decorated dinner plates with theater themes, reflecting her grandmother’s passion. We spent a pleasant hour (yes, hour) scrolling through the Colette’s Cakes Web site to choose the prettiest cake. Jamie and I shot a DVD of Eliza singing a selection of Judy’s favorite songs, with Eleanor toddling through the action.
On the night of the party, before everyone was due to arrive at 6:30 P.M., I began my anxious last-minute tidying. My mother loves to entertain, and from her I inherited a propensity to preparty jitters, which we call “hostess neurosis”; experienced family members know to drift out of sight lest they be conscripted into sudden vacuuming. But when Jamie emerged from hiding at 6:29 P.M., he was wearing khakis, a plaid shirt, and no shoes.
I took a moment; then, careful to use a light tone, I remarked, “I wish you were wearing something a little nicer.”
Jamie looked as if he took a moment, then answered, “I’ll put on a nicer pair of pants, is that okay?” Then he went up and changed his pants and his shirt and put on shoes, too.
The evening unfolded exactly as I’d hoped. Before the adults sat down for dinner, the granddaughters ate chicken salad sandwiches—Judy’s favorite—with their grandmother. We presented the birthday cake while the girls were still awake so they could sing “Happy Birthday” and eat a piece. Then we packed the girls off to bed, and the adults sat down to eat (Indian food, Judy’s favorite).
“This was really a perfect evening,” Judy said as everyone stood up to go. “I loved everything about it. My presents, the food, the cake—really, everything was wonderful.” It was obvious that Judy really did enjoy the party, and everyone was pleased to have played a part, but I think I enjoyed it most of all. I was so happy that it had turned out just right.
The party underscored the truth of the third of my Twelve Commandments: “Act the way I want to feel.” Although I might have predicted that organizing the party would make me feel resentful, in fact, acting in a loving way amplified my loving feelings toward everyone in the family, particularly Judy.
I must admit, however, that at times before the party, I felt that Jamie and the others weren’t appreciative enough. I was happy to do the planning, and I would’ve been annoyed if anyone else had tried to take over, but still I wanted my gold star. I wanted Jamie, Bob, or Phil to say, “Wow, Gretchen, you’re really putting together a terrific evening! Thanks so much for your brilliant, creative, and thoughtful planning!” That wasn’t going to happen—so let it go. Do it for myself.
But Jamie knows me very well. While Judy was opening her gifts, Jamie pulled a box from a shelf and handed it to me.
“This is for you,” he said.
“For me?” I was surprised and pleased. “Why do I get a present?” Jamie didn’t answer, but I knew.
I opened the box to find a beautiful necklace made of polished wooden beads. “I love it!” I said as I tried it on. Maybe I shouldn’t have needed the recognition, but Jamie was right, I did.
One of the great joys of falling in love is the feeling that the most extraordinary person in the entire world has chosen you. I remember being astonished when, after I pointed out my new boyfriend, Jamie, to my law school roommate, she admitted, “I’ve never seen him before.” I honestly couldn’t imagine that everyone’s eyes weren’t drawn to him every time he walked down the hallway or into the dining hall.
Over time, however, spouses start to take each other for granted. Jamie is my fate. He’s my soul mate. He pervades my whole existence. So, of course, I often ignore him.
The more readily you respond to a spouse’s bids for attention, the stronger your marriage—but it’s easy to fall into bad habits. Too often I hear myself murmuring “Mmm-hmmm,” with my eyes glued to the book I’m reading as Jamie makes a joke or starts a conversation. Also, marriage has a strange muffling effect on some kinds of deep communication. Most married people have probably had the experience of hearing their spouse make a startling revelation to a stranger at a barbecue; it’s hard to have reflective, probing conversations during the tumult of daily life.
I’d fallen into the bad marriage habit of being less considerate of Jamie than I was of other people. As part of my resolution to “Give proofs of love,” I tried to think of small treats or courtesies for Jamie. One night when some friends came over, after taking everyone else’s drink order, I added, “How about you, Jamie? What would you like?” Usually I just worry about taking care of the guests, so Jamie looked surprised but pleased. His travel toiletry kit was falling apart, so I bought him a new one and loaded it with travel supplies. I left the new Sports Illustrated out on the table, so he’d see it when he walked in the door from work.
One way to make sure that you’re paying attention to your spouse is to spend time alone together, and marriage experts universally advise that couples have frequent child-free “date nights.” One of my happiness project challenges, however, was to figure out what recommendations to ignore, and I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for “date nights.” Jamie and I seem to go out a lot, to various school, work, or friend functions, and we like to stay home when we can. I dreaded the thought of adding another item to the schedule.
Plus I figured Jamie would never go along with it.
Jamie surprised me when I floated the idea. “We can if you want,” he said. “It might be fun to go see a movie or have dinner, the two of us. But we go out so much, it’s nice to stay in.” I agreed, but it made me happy that even though he didn’t want to do it, he agreed with the goal.
In addition to ignoring some expert advice, I also sought the advice of nonexperts. One night, when my book group didn’t have much to say about the book we’d picked, I asked for my friends’ suggestions about marriage.
“You should both go to bed at the same time,” said one friend. “No matter what, something good will come of it. You’ll get more sleep or have sex or have a conversation.”
“Before I got married, my boss told me that the secret to a strong marriage is to leave at least three things unsaid each day.”
“My husband and I never criticize each other for more than one thing at a time.”
“My Quaker grandparents, who were married seventy-two years, said that each married couple should have an outdoor game, like tennis or golf, and an indoor game, like Scrabble or gin, that they play together.”
When I got home, I told Jamie that rule, and the next day he brought home a backgammon set.
I’d been working on giving proofs of love when I decided to push myself to the highest level of proof: a Week of Extreme Nice.
What was “Extreme Nice”? It was an extreme sport, like bungee jumping or skydiving, that stretched me beyond my ordinary efforts, that showed me new depths within myself. All done in the comfort of my own home. For a week, I was extremely nice to Jamie. No criticism! No snapping! No nagging! I even offered to drop his shoes off at the shoe-repair shop before he asked me!
Extreme Nice reminded me to aim for a high standard of behavior. It’s not right that I show more consideration to my friends or family than to Jamie, the love of my life. We wouldn’t be able to live together forever without a disagreement, but I should be able to go more than a week without nagging him. In a way, of course, the entire month of February was an exercise in Extreme Nice, because all my resolutions worked to Jamie’s benefit. But for this week, I was going to take my niceness to a dramatic new level.
Too often I focused on the things that annoyed me: Jamie postponed making scheduling decisions; he didn’t answer my e-mails; he didn’t appreciate what I do to make our lives run smoothly. Instead, I should have thought about all the things I love about him. He’s kind, funny, brilliant, thoughtful, loving, ambitious, sweet, a good father, son, and son-in-law, bizarrely well informed on a wide range of subjects, creative, hardworking, magnanimous. He kisses me and says, “I love you,” every night before we go to sleep, he comes to my side at parties and puts his arm around me, he rarely shows irritation or criticizes me. He even has a full head of hair.
On the first morning of Extreme Nice, Jamie asked tentatively, “I’d like to get up and go to the gym and get it over with. Okay?” He’s compulsive about going to the gym.
Instead of giving him a pained look or a grudging “Okay, but go ahead and go now so you can get back soon, we promised the girls we’d go to the park,” I said, “Sure, no problem!”
It wasn’t easy.
A moment of reframing helped. How would I feel if Jamie never wanted to go to the gym—or worse, if he couldn’t go? I have a gorgeous, athletic husband. How lucky I am that he wants to go to the gym.
During the week of Extreme Nice, when Jamie sneaked into our bedroom to take a nap, I let him sleep while I made lunch for Eliza and Eleanor; I kept our bathroom tidy instead of leaving bottles and tubes scattered over the counter; he rented The Aristocrats, and I said, “Great!” I stopped leaving Popsicle wrappers all over the apartment. As pathetic as it is to report, each of these instances took considerable restraint on my part.
Because of Extreme Nice, when I discovered one night that Jamie had thrown away The Economist and the Entertainment Weekly that I hadn’t read yet, I didn’t badger him about it. When I woke up the next morning, I saw how insignificant it was and was relieved I hadn’t indulged in a scene.
I’d always followed the adage “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger,” which meant, in practical terms, that I scrupulously aired every annoyance as soon as possible, to make sure I had my chance to vent my bad feelings before bedtime. I was surprised to learn from my research, however, that the well-known notion of anger catharsis is poppycock. There’s no evidence for the belief that “letting off steam” is healthy or constructive. In fact, studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn’t relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.
Extreme Nice also started me thinking about the degree to which Jamie and I accepted orders from each other. It’s safe to say that married people spend a lot of time trying to coax each other into performing various chores, and the ability to cooperate in tackling daily tasks is a key component of a happy marriage. Often I wish I could tell Jamie, “Call the super” or “Unload the dishwasher,” and have him obey me unhesitatingly. And I’m sure he wishes he could say, “Don’t eat outside the kitchen” or “Find the keys to the basement storage room,” and have me obey him. So I tried to do cheerfully whatever he asked me to do, without debate.
As the days went by, I did feel a bit of resentment when Jamie never seemed to notice that he was the winner of a Week of Extreme Nice. Then I realized that I should be pleased that he didn’t notice, because it showed that the Week of Extreme Nice wasn’t a shocking improvement over our regular, unextreme lives.
The Week of Extreme Nice proved the power of my commandment to “Act the way I want to feel”; because I was treating Jamie extremely nicely, I found myself feeling more tender toward him. Nevertheless, although it was a valuable experiment, I was relieved when the week was over. I couldn’t keep up the intensity of being that Nice. My tongue hurt because I’d bitten it so often.
As I was filling in my Resolutions Chart on the last afternoon of February, I was struck by the significance of the chart to my happiness project. The process of constantly reviewing my resolutions and holding myself accountable each day was already having a big effect on my behavior, and it wasn’t even March yet. I’d made dozens of resolutions in my life—every New Year since I was nine or ten years old—but keeping the Resolutions Chart was allowing me to live up to my resolutions more faithfully than I’d even been able to do before. I’d heard the business school truism “You manage what you measure,” and I could see how this phenomenon worked in my case.
The end of February brought me another important realization as well. For a long time, I’d been puzzling to come up with an overall theory of happiness, and one afternoon, after many false starts, I arrived at my earth-shattering happiness formula.
It hit me while I was on the subway. I was reading Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer’s Happiness and Economics, and I looked up for a moment to ponder the meaning of the sentence “It has been shown that pleasant affect, unpleasant affect, and life satisfaction are separable constructs.” Along the same lines, I’d just read some research that showed that happiness and unhappiness (or, in more scientific terms, positive affect and negative affect) aren’t opposite sides of the same emotion—they’re distinct and rise and fall independently. Suddenly, as I thought about these ideas and about my own experience so far, everything slipped into place, and my happiness formula sprang into my mind with such a jolt that I felt as if the other subway riders must have been able to see a lightbulb appearing above my head.
To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right.
So simple, yet so profound. It looks like something you might read on the cover of a glossy magazine, but it had taken enormous effort to come up with a framework that ordered and distilled everything I’d learned.
To be happy, I needed to generate more positive emotions, so that I increased the amount of joy, pleasure, enthusiasm, gratitude, intimacy, and friendship in my life. That wasn’t hard to understand. I also needed to remove sources of bad feelings, so that I suffered less guilt, remorse, shame, anger, envy, boredom, and irritation. Also easy to understand. And apart from feeling more “good” and feeling less “bad,” I saw that I also needed to consider feeling right.
“Feeling right” was a trickier concept: it was the feeling that I’m living the life I’m supposed to lead. In my own case, although I’d had a great experience as a lawyer, I’d been haunted by an uncomfortable feeling—that I wasn’t doing what I was “supposed” to be doing. Now, though my writing career can be a source of “feeling bad” as well as “feeling good,” I do “feel right.”
“Feeling right” is about living the life that’s right for you—in occupation, location, marital status, and so on. It’s also about virtue: doing your duty, living up to the expectations you set for yourself. For some people, “feeling right” can also include less elevated considerations: achieving a certain job status or material standard of living.
After the first few minutes, the ecstasy of discovering my formula wore off, and I realized that it wasn’t quite complete. It was lacking some important element. I searched for a way to account for the fact that people seem programmed to be striving constantly, to be stretching toward happiness. For example, we tend to think that we’ll be slightly happier in the future than we are in the present. And a sense of purpose is very important to happiness. But my formula didn’t account for these observations. I searched for the missing concept—was it striving? Advancement? Purpose? Hope? None of these words seemed right. Then I thought of a line from William Butler Yeats. “Happiness,” wrote Yeats, “is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn’t goal attainment but the process of striving after goals—that is, growth—that brings happiness.
Of course. Growth. Growth explains the happiness brought by training for a marathon, learning a new language, collecting stamps; by helping children learn to talk; by cooking your way through every recipe in a Julia Child cookbook. My father was a great tennis player and played a lot when I was growing up. At some point, he started playing golf and, over time, gave up tennis. I asked him why. “My tennis game,” he explained, “was gradually getting worse, but my golf game is improving.”
People are very adaptable, and we quickly adjust to a new life circumstance—for better or worse—and consider it normal. Although this helps us when our situation worsens, it means that when circumstances improve, we soon become hardened to new comforts or privileges. This “hedonic treadmill,” as it’s called, makes it easy to grow accustomed to some of the things that make you “feel good,” such as a new car, a new job title, or air-conditioning, so that the good feeling wears off. An atmosphere of growth offsets that. You may soon take your new dining room table for granted, but tending your garden will give you fresh joy and surprise every spring. Growth is important in a spiritual sense, and I do think that material growth is gratifying as well. As much as folks insist that money can’t buy happiness, for example, it’s awfully nice to have more money this year than you had last year.
So I arrived at my final formula, and it struck me as so important that I named it the First Splendid Truth—I’d have to trust that I’d have at least one more Splendid Truth by the time the year was over. The First Splendid Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.
I called Jamie the minute I got home. “At last!” I said. “I have my happiness formula! It’s just one sentence long, and with it, I can tie together all the studies, all the loose ends that were driving me crazy.”
“That’s great!” said Jamie, very enthusiastically. Pause.
“Don’t you want to hear the formula?” I hinted. I had decided not to expect Jamie to play the role of my female writing partner—but sometimes he just was going to have to do his best.
“Of course, right!” he said. “What’s the formula?”
Well, he was trying. And maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that now that I was trying harder, Jamie was trying harder, too. I couldn’t put my finger on what was different exactly, but he seemed more loving. He wasn’t much interested in talking about happiness—in fact, he felt like a bit of a martyr to my inexhaustible enthusiasm for the subject—but he had started replacing the dead lightbulbs without waiting for me to bug him, and he seemed to be answering my e-mails more diligently. He bought us the backgammon set. He asked me for my happiness formula.
When thinking about happiness in marriage, you may have an almost irresistible impulse to focus on your spouse, to emphasize how he or she should change in order to boost your happiness. But the fact is, you can’t change anyone but yourself. A friend told me that her “marriage mantra” was “I love Leo, just as he is.” I love Jamie just as he is. I can’t make him do a better job of doing household chores, I can only stop myself from nagging—and that makes me happier. When you give up expecting a spouse to change (within reason), you lessen anger and resentment, and that creates a more loving atmosphere in a marriage.