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

consideration to my friends or family than to Jamie, the love of my life. We wouldn’t be able to live together forever without a disagreement, but I should be able to go more than a week without nagging him. In a way, of course, the entire month of Februarywas an exercise in Extreme Nice, because all my resolutions worked to Jamie’s benefit. But for this week, I was going to take my niceness to a dramatic new level.
    Too often I focused on the things that annoyed me: Jamie postponed making scheduling decisions; he didn’t answer my e-mails; he didn’t appreciate what I do to make our lives run smoothly. Instead, I should have thought about all the things I love about him. He’s kind, funny, brilliant, thoughtful, loving, ambitious, sweet, a good father, son, and son-in-law, bizarrely well informed on a wide range of subjects, creative, hardworking, magnanimous. He kisses me and says, “I love you,” every night before we go to sleep, he comes to my side at parties and puts his arm around me, he rarely shows irritation or criticizes me. He even has a full head of hair.
    On the first morning of Extreme Nice, Jamie asked tentatively, “I’d like to get up and go to the gym and get it over with. Okay?” He’s compulsive about going to the gym.
    Instead of giving him a pained look or a grudging “Okay, but go ahead and go now so you can get back soon, we promised the girls we’d go to the park,” I said, “Sure, no problem!”
    It wasn’t easy.
    A moment of reframing helped. How would I feel if Jamie never wanted to go to the gym—or worse, if he couldn’t go? I have a gorgeous, athletic husband. How lucky I am that he wants to go to the gym.
    During the week of Extreme Nice, when Jamie sneaked into our bedroom to take a nap, I let him sleep while I made lunch for Eliza and Eleanor; I kept our bathroom tidy instead of leaving bottles and tubes scattered over the counter; he rented The Aristocrats, and I said, “Great!” I stopped leaving Popsicle wrappers all over the apartment. As pathetic as it is to report, each of these instances took considerable restraint on my part.
    Because of Extreme Nice, when I discovered one night that Jamie had thrown away The Economist and the Entertainment Weekly that Ihadn’t read yet, I didn’t badger him about it. When I woke up the next morning, I saw how insignificant it was and was relieved I hadn’t indulged in a scene.
    I’d always followed the adage “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger,” which meant, in practical terms, that I scrupulously aired every annoyance as soon as possible, to make sure I had my chance to vent my bad feelings before bedtime. I was surprised to learn from my research, however, that the well-known notion of anger catharsis is poppycock. There’s no evidence for the belief that “letting off steam” is healthy or constructive. In fact, studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn’t relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.
    Extreme Nice also started me thinking about the degree to which Jamie and I accepted orders from each other. It’s safe to say that married people spend a lot of time trying to coax each other into performing various chores, and the ability to cooperate in tackling daily tasks is a key component of a happy marriage. Often I wish I could tell Jamie, “Call the super” or “Unload the dishwasher,” and have him obey me unhesitatingly. And I’m sure he wishes he could say, “Don’t eat outside the kitchen” or “Find the keys to the basement storage room,” and have me obey him. So I tried to do cheerfully whatever he asked me to do, without debate.
    As the days went by, I did feel a bit of resentment when Jamie never seemed to notice that he was the winner of a Week of Extreme Nice. Then I realized that I should be pleased that he didn’t notice, because it showed that the Week of Extreme Nice wasn’t a shocking improvement over our regular, unextreme lives.
    The Week of Extreme Nice proved the power of my commandment to “Act the way I want to feel” because I was treating Jamie extremely nicely, I found myself feeling more tender toward him. Nevertheless, although it was a valuable experiment, I was relieved when the week was over. I couldn’t keep up the intensity of being that Nice. My tongue hurt because I’d bitten it so often.
     
    As I was filling in my Resolutions Chart on the last