Happiness Ruined Everything

We were snuggling on the couch when he said it:

“I guess you’re not happy.”

That was a weird thing to hear, because I was happy. But instead of getting to live in that moment, I wound up spending the next hour trying to convince him I was happy—and it still wasn’t good enough.

He left.

Over the next few months, he started talking to his ex again, on the phone, without telling me. He went back to her. Then he came back to me. Then he broke up with me two more times. The whole saga, two years, he kept me a secret from his parents, who pressured him to give up the career he wanted and go to law school. Last I heard, my old fiancé had finally gotten married again.

A few months after the breakup, I got a new teaching job. Even though I was full-time faculty, they didn’t give me my own office. I shared one with another teacher, who was going through her Eat, Pray, Love phase.

She also talked a lot about happiness.

She tried to give up all her possessions and live in a Buddhist monastery. Spoiler alert, it didn’t make her happy. So she came back to the states and did something very similar to what I’d done, fall in love with someone who dumped her three times. Except they went all the way.

They got married.

She maxed out her credit cards replacing all the stuff she’d given away. For the next year, she tried extra hard to have it all.

One day, she came home to find their apartment cleaned out. There was a little note on the fridge that said something like:

“Sorry, I’m just not happy.”

They all thought about happiness a lot, and it confirms something I’ve learned from diving through psychology and sociology journals over the years, while navigating a world saturated in sacchrine joy, trying to figure out what’s wrong with people and why we’re in this dystopian timeline:

The more you think about happiness, the more you chase it…

The more miserable it makes you.