The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

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 inwhich 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