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

his mother.
    Here’s an example of how not to fight right. Apparently, much as I hate to acknowledge it, I may snore from time to time. I hate to hear any mention of it, because snoring sounds so unattractive, but when Jamie joked about it one morning, I was trying to “be light,” so I laughed along with him.
    Then, a few weeks later, as we were listening to our favorite all-news radio station before the 6:30 alarm rang and I was reflecting groggily on how much more peaceful our bedroom was now that I’d cleared away so much mess, Jamie said in a sweet, kidding-around way, “I’ll start the day with two observations. First, you snore.”
    I snapped. “So that’s the first thing I have to hear in the morning?” I exploded. I practically threw the covers in his face as I got out of bed.“That I snore. Can you think of nothing nicer to say?” I stormed across the room and started yanking clothes out of the closet. “If you want me to stop, give me a poke while I’m sleeping, but don’t keep harping on it!”
    Lesson learned? By laughing along with him, I’d made Jamie think that snoring was a good subject for a joke. I tried to be light, but I couldn’t; I wish I could always laugh at myself easily, but in some situations, I can’t, and I should have responded honestly, so I could avoid an eventual blowup. Jamie had had no warning that his comment was going to enrage me. So much for “Fight right.” This time, I hadn’t managed to keep my resolution—I couldn’t even bring myself to apologize, I just wanted to forget about it—but next time, I’d do better (I hoped).
    In marriage, it’s less important to have many pleasant experiences than it is to have fewer unpleasant experiences, because people have a “negativity bias” our reactions to bad events are faster, stronger, and stickier than our reactions to good events. In fact, in practically every language, there are more concepts to describe negative emotions than positive emotions.
    It takes at least five positive marital actions to offset one critical or destructive action, so one way to strengthen a marriage is to make sure that the positive far outweighs the negative. When a couple’s interactions are usually loving and kind, it’s much easier to disregard the occasional unpleasant exchange. I had a feeling, however, that it would take more than five marital actions, on both our parts, to offset the negative force of our snoring exchange.
     
    Fighting right made a big difference to my happiness, because the failure to fight right was a significant source of guilt in my life. As Mark Twain observed, “An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.” When Jamie did something annoying and I snapped at him, and then I felt bad about snapping, I blamed it on him. But in fact, I realized, a major cause of my bad feelings wasn’t Jamie’s behavior but rather my guilt about my reaction to his behavior; fighting right eliminated that guilt and so made me happier.
    One day when I repeatedly failed to fight right helped me to see this point clearly. For Presidents Day weekend, we went on a little vacation with Jamie’s parents. My in-laws, Judy and Bob, are wonderful grandparents with whom to vacation—helpful, easygoing, with a reasonable tolerance for chaos—but they like to have plenty of time when traveling, and in our rush to get out the door to meet them, I let myself get too hungry. Just as we were leaving the apartment, I realized I was famished, and I gave myself a quick fix by digging into an enormous heart-shaped box of M&M’s that Eliza had gotten for Valentine’s Day.
    Eating all that candy made me feel guilty and a little sick, and I couldn’t keep from making nasty remarks. The worse I behaved, the guiltier I felt, and that made me behave worse.
    “Jamie, please get those papers out of my way.”
    “Eliza, stop leaning on me, you’re hurting my arm.”
    “Jamie, can’t you get that bag?”
    Even after we arrived at the hotel, having made a wrong start, I couldn’t shake my bad feelings.
    “Are you okay?” Jamie asked me at one point.
    “Sure, I’m fine,” I mumbled, temporarily chastened, but my bad mood soon reasserted itself.
    That night, after Eliza and Eleanor went to sleep, the adults could finally have a sustained conversation. We drank our after-dinner coffee (even after years as part of this family, I still marvel at Judy’s and Bob’s ability to drink espresso with caffeine after dinner) and talked