Happiness doesn’t work the way you seem to think it does: there is actually no way to sacrifice your happiness for theirs, so there’s no balance or equilibrium decision to make. You CAN reduce your happiness, but it won’t increase theirs, so there’s not much reason to do so.
The keys (for me) have been:
Know that you’re not responsible for their happiness. You’re allowed to be happy even when your partner is sad. Ideally, this makes their sadness somewhat less.
Much mutual trust, communication, and knowledge about depression and happiness. Your partner needs to appreciate and desire your happiness, even if they don’t feel it themselves.
Many other dimensions of compatibility and significant (not continuous or even majority) joyful shared events.
Really, those are key to any serious long-term relationship, romantic or otherwise. A happiness differential puts a lot more weight on other dimensions of compatibility, rather than being the only important thing.
tl;dr: An unhappy partner can still want to and succeed in making you happy. But it’s probably rare.
(having some issues with the standard anon account, so I created another. pass is the same if anyone else needs)
Thanks, this is helpful.
You can’t directly transfuse happiness, but I find tradeoffs come up constantly, with varying rates of return. Doing extra household chores, staying up late when my partner can’t sleep, choosing their preferred activities instead of mine when these differ...
In light of this, point one is hard. As long as there are things I can do, I feel very responsible for their happiness.
Point two is tough because I fear feedback loops if I let it be known that their unhappiness is causing me unhappiness, so I tend to hide it when I’m upset. This is not-great psychologically. On the other hand, they’ve gotten pretty comfortable talking to me about these things, which does help.
We’re extremely strong on point three, which is why I’m flouting Adams’ advice.
One size does not fit all, so make your own choices—I do subscribe to some of the underlying principles of the advice, one of which I think of as “you can’t take care of someone else if you aren’t taking care of yourself”.
If you’re consistently failing with points 1 and 2, it’s worth setting some hard limits on when to abandon this project in search of a better one. I often recommend a book (The Dip)[http://smile.amazon.com/The-Dip-Little-Teaches-Stick/dp/1591841666] for work-related decisions of this form, but it applies to relationships as well.
Those feedback loops are real, and being mutually aware and communicative of them is necessary—it doesn’t remove the temptation to sacrifice for your partner (IMO, that’s a feature, not a bug), but it does let you see the reinforcement cycles and help you to choose which ones to damp and which to drive.
Yes, it can work.
Happiness doesn’t work the way you seem to think it does: there is actually no way to sacrifice your happiness for theirs, so there’s no balance or equilibrium decision to make. You CAN reduce your happiness, but it won’t increase theirs, so there’s not much reason to do so.
The keys (for me) have been:
Know that you’re not responsible for their happiness. You’re allowed to be happy even when your partner is sad. Ideally, this makes their sadness somewhat less.
Much mutual trust, communication, and knowledge about depression and happiness. Your partner needs to appreciate and desire your happiness, even if they don’t feel it themselves.
Many other dimensions of compatibility and significant (not continuous or even majority) joyful shared events.
Really, those are key to any serious long-term relationship, romantic or otherwise. A happiness differential puts a lot more weight on other dimensions of compatibility, rather than being the only important thing.
tl;dr: An unhappy partner can still want to and succeed in making you happy. But it’s probably rare.
(having some issues with the standard anon account, so I created another. pass is the same if anyone else needs)
Thanks, this is helpful.
You can’t directly transfuse happiness, but I find tradeoffs come up constantly, with varying rates of return. Doing extra household chores, staying up late when my partner can’t sleep, choosing their preferred activities instead of mine when these differ...
In light of this, point one is hard. As long as there are things I can do, I feel very responsible for their happiness.
Point two is tough because I fear feedback loops if I let it be known that their unhappiness is causing me unhappiness, so I tend to hide it when I’m upset. This is not-great psychologically. On the other hand, they’ve gotten pretty comfortable talking to me about these things, which does help.
We’re extremely strong on point three, which is why I’m flouting Adams’ advice.
One size does not fit all, so make your own choices—I do subscribe to some of the underlying principles of the advice, one of which I think of as “you can’t take care of someone else if you aren’t taking care of yourself”.
If you’re consistently failing with points 1 and 2, it’s worth setting some hard limits on when to abandon this project in search of a better one. I often recommend a book (The Dip)[http://smile.amazon.com/The-Dip-Little-Teaches-Stick/dp/1591841666] for work-related decisions of this form, but it applies to relationships as well.
Those feedback loops are real, and being mutually aware and communicative of them is necessary—it doesn’t remove the temptation to sacrifice for your partner (IMO, that’s a feature, not a bug), but it does let you see the reinforcement cycles and help you to choose which ones to damp and which to drive.