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The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Marriage and Happiness
When a social scientist “proved” that married people are happier, the media had a field day. But are we even asking the right question?
As a child, I knew two things about my future to be true: One, I would someday be a writer. Two, I would never, ever get divorced.
There were a few kids in my class with divorced parents, and their lives struck me as horribly disjointed. They constantly had to schlep between different houses with different rules and different parents, sometimes losing track of what was where. I appreciated that I had all my things in one place, and I cherished how close-knit my family was, even if my own parents didn’t always get along. The only downside of my stable childhood was that I couldn’t become the tortured writer we love to celebrate, one whose genius was forged by early years full of misery and trauma.
That I would marry someone eventually was a given. Even on the heels of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture movement, in which both my parents took part, I was still fed a steady diet of “damsel in distress meets Prince Charming” stories. I spent quite a bit of time pontificating on who this Prince Charming might be, and whether we would live in a mansion or (God forbid) an…
