Who has time to worry about whether or not they are happy? Well, if you are reading this then you probably do.
This summer I found myself with some time on my hands. I decided that I wanted to be intentional about enriching my mind so rather than exclusively listening to music I started listening to podcasts. My current favorite podcast is Hidden Brain on NPR. I recently listened to a show that’s part of their You 2.0 series call When Did Marriage Become So Hard? Several themes of the show and the research shared resonated with me and validated some of my own thoughts about the “First-World” human condition.
I have been saying this for a while to anyone who would listen, but basically because many people here in the U.S. and other parts of the world find that their basic needs are met they have time to worry about things like how fulfilled they are in life and their relationships. When we don’t have to worry about where our next meal is coming from or where we are going to sleep that night then we have time to pose questions like “Am I happy?” and “Is my partner meeting my emotional needs?”. The researcher Eli Finkel, a fellow Northwestern grad (Go U! NU!) and current professor at the University utilizes Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a framework that can be applied to how we approach our relationships, particularly the marital relationship.
When exploring the How? and Why? of current phenomena I tend to look to the origin of things and influence of cultural and social changes over time. I have long held the belief that where family and intimate partner relationships are concerned we put too much pressure on this unit and these people to fulfill our socio-emotional needs. What was once a village is now a small unit that is all too frequently a stranger to their neighbors.
…over time, we’ve piled more and more of these emotional and psychological functions.
Eli FinkelNot only do we put pressure on those closest to us to meet all of our needs, we also put a lot of pressure on ourselves, which impacts our mental health. Similar to how Eli Finkel noted that we look to our marital relationships to be something that they have never been, we also look to ourselves for something that we historically never have had the time for. Whether we were hunting and gathering, maintaining a farm, family business, or household, these activities consumed our lives leaving no time to question whether or not we were happy. But now with grocery stores, long commutes, desk jobs, and robotic vacuums we have time that we never had before to “self-actualize” and contemplate our happiness.
Where this is impacting our mental health is that culturally we have bought into the notion that we can expect to be happy and that if we are not then that contributes to depression and anxiety. Not to say that this is the sole source of such emotions. As a mental health professional I would not presume to be so simplistic, but I believe that the expectation of happiness does contribute anxiety and depression which feeds into the unrealistic expectations that we have for self, and the cycle goes on…
But what is HAPPY anyway? How do we know when we have achieved that state? Sometimes we see people or couples who we think are happy only to find out that they are not and have not been for a while. So who really knows what happiness is? We have no real frame of reference because from a historical perspective we have only recently had the time to even think about being happy.
In his book The All-or-Nothing Marriage, Finkel suggest that maybe we should just back off a little. He does not put it that way but that is the point. Maybe we should ask a little less of the people around us and stop looking to our partners to fulfill all of our needs. I would add that maybe we should back off of ourselves a little as well. Perhaps we should aspire to be observers of our emotions and seek to gain insight and learn about ourselves rather than conceiving of our emotions in terms of how far they are from HAPPY.
As I write this I am keenly aware that there are vast numbers of people in this world and in this country who are struggling to meet basic needs while being bombarded by the ideas and images that there is something more to be had in life. And even if you know where your next meal is coming from and you know where you are sleeping tonight, you may not entirely be sure about how you will pay for it next month and all of this is happening while you are “unhappy” with your job and your partner says they need more emotional validation from you.
If you are in a relationship or aspire to be I highly recommend checking out this podcast since you probably have the time…