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

on.”
    “But this material is great,” I said. “There’s so much fascinating research.”
    “Sure, but people don’t bother to read these books unless they have issues. ”
    Maybe Jamie was right, but I was happy that I’d had a reason to study the latest findings about marriage and relationships. I’d learned a lot. For example, there’s an intriguing difference in how men and women approach intimacy. Although men and women agree that sharing activities and self-disclosure are important, women’s idea of an intimate moment is a face-to-face conversation, while men feel close when they work or play sitting alongside someone.
    So when Jamie asked, “Do you want to watch The Shield ?” I understood that in his eyes, watching TV together counted as true quality time, not we’re-just-sitting-in-a-room-watching-TV-not-talking-to-each-other time.
    “Great idea!” I answered. And, as it turned out, while lying in bed watching a TV show about a rogue cop in L.A. didn’t sound very romantic, it felt romantic once we were cozily settled in against the pillows.
    Perhaps because men have this low standard for what qualifies as intimacy, both men and women find relationships with women to be more intimate and enjoyable than those with men. Women have more feelings of empathy for other people than men do (though women and men have about the same degree of empathy for animals, whatever that means). In fact, for both men and women—and this finding struck me as highly significant—the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a difference.
    Learning about this research made a difference in my attitude toward Jamie. I love him with all my heart, and I know he loves me, and I know that I can absolutely trust and confide in him, yet I often felt frustrated because he never wanted to have long heart-to-heart discussions. In particular, I wished that he would take more interest in my work. My sister,Elizabeth, is a TV writer, and I envy her having her writing partner, Sarah. Practically daily, she and Sarah have marathon conversations about their writing and career strategies. I don’t have a partner or any colleagues with whom to discuss work issues, so I wanted Jamie to fill that role for me.
    Also, I expected to be able to dump all my insecurities into Jamie’s lap. I’d start conversations with enticing openers such as “I’m worried that I’m not living up to my potential” or “I’m doing a bad job of networking” or “What if my writing is no good?” Jamie, remarkably, didn’t want to have these conversations, and that made me angry. I wanted him to help me work through my feelings of anxiety and self-doubt.
    Learning that men and women both turn to women for understanding showed me that Jamie wasn’t ignoring me out of lack of interest or affection; he just wasn’t good at giving that kind of support. Jamie wasn’t going to have a long discussion about whether I should start a blog or how I should structure my book. He didn’t want to spend hours pumping up my self-confidence. He was never going to play the role of a female writing partner, and it wasn’t realistic to expect him to do it. If I needed that kind of support, I should figure out another way to get it. My realization didn’t change his behavior—but I stopped feeling so resentful.
    I’d also noticed that the more upset I felt, the less Jamie seemed to want to talk about it.
    “You know,” I said to him one night, “I’m feeling anxious. I wish you’d try to help me feel better. The worse I feel, the less you seem to want to talk to me.”
    “I just can’t stand to see you unhappy,” he answered.
    Light again dawned. It wasn’t perversity that kept Jamie from being a sympathetic listener; not only was he constitutionally less oriented to having long heart-to-heart conversations, he also tried to avoid any topic that got me upset, because he found it so painful to see me feeling blue. Now, that didn’t let him off the hook altogether—sometimes I needed a sympathetic listener, even if he didn’t feel like playing that role—but at least I understood his perspective.
    Our conversation started me thinking about how my happiness affected Jamie and others. I’d heard the aphorism “Happy wife, happy life” or, put another way, “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” At first I’d thought that sounded great—yippee, it’s all about