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

pleasing me !—but if these sayings are true, it’s a tremendous responsibility.
    I’d wondered whether my happiness project was selfish, because it seemed self-indulgent to concentrate on my own happiness. True, I do make other people happy when I tend to my own happiness—I was trying not to snap at Jamie and to laugh at his jokes. But it went beyond that. By being happy myself, I was better able to try to make other people happier.
    Happy people generally are more forgiving, helpful, and charitable, have better self-control, and are more tolerant of frustration than unhappy people, while unhappy people are more often withdrawn, defensive, antagonistic, and self-absorbed. Oscar Wilde observed, “One is not always happy when one is good; but one is always good when one is happy.”
    Happiness has a particularly strong influence in marriage, because spouses pick up each other’s moods so easily. A 30 percent increase in one spouse’s happiness boosts the other spouse’s happiness, while a drop in one spouse’s happiness drags the other down. (Not only that: I was fascinated to learn that in a phenomenon known as “health concordance,” partners’ health behaviors tend to merge, as they pick up good or bad habits from each other related to eating, exercising, visiting doctors, smoking, and drinking.)
    I know that Jamie wants me to be happy. In fact, the happier I seem to be, the more Jamie tries to make me happy, and when I’m unhappy—for whatever reason—Jamie goes into a funk. So, as part of my attempt to be happy, I resolved, “No dumping,” especially on Jamie. I would bring up my worries if I really needed Jamie’s counsel or support, but I wouldn’t dump my minor troubles on him.
    I had an opportunity to live up to my resolution one Sunday morning. It was a rare moment of calm. Jamie was cleaning up the mess he’d created while whipping up pancakes, Eliza was absorbed in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Eleanor was covering every page of a Scooby-Doo coloringbook with green crayon, and I was going through the mail. I opened an innocent-looking letter from our credit card company to discover that because of a security breach on its end, our main credit card had been canceled, and we’d been issued a new card and number.
    I was furious. Now I’d have to go into every account that relied on that credit card number to update it. I hadn’t kept a list, so I had no idea how I was going to figure out which accounts needed to be changed. Our automatic toll pass, our Amazon account, my gym membership…what else? The statement was so matter-of-fact too; no apology, no little perk to acknowledge the corporate fault or the inconvenience to cardholders. This was the kind of chore that made me crazy: it took up precious time and mental energy, yet when it was done, I was no better off than before I started it.
    “I can’t believe this!” I fumed to Jamie. “They’ve canceled our credit card because of their mistake!” I was prepared to launch into a full diatribe when the thought flashed through my mind: “No dumping.” I paused. Why should I spoil a peaceful moment with my irritation? Hearing someone complain is tiresome whether you’re in a good mood or a bad one and whether or not the complaining is justified. I took a deep breath and stopped in mid-rant. “Oh, well” was all I said, in a tone of forced calm.
    Jamie looked at me with surprise, then relief. He probably knew what an effort it had taken for me to restrain myself. When I got up to get more coffee, he stood up to give me a hug, without saying anything.
    GIVE PROOFS OF LOVE.
    I’ve never forgotten something I read in college, by Pierre Reverdy: “There is no love; there are only proofs of love.” Whatever love I might feel in my heart, others will see only my actions.
    When I looked back at my Resolutions Chart, I could see that some entries, such as “Toss, restore, organize” boasted a row of cheerful checkmarks, while other resolutions were dotted with X marks. I was doing a lot better with “Go to sleep earlier” than with “Don’t expect praise or appreciation.” Fortunately, “Give proofs of love” seemed like the kind of action that could easily become a pleasant habit.
    Some ways of showing my love were easy. Because people are 47 percent (how do they come up with these statistics?) more apt to feel close to a family member who often expresses affection than to one who rarely does, I started telling