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First comes happiness, then comes marriage
By Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post
Does your date/partner/spouse make you miserable? Meet Richard
Lucas, a professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
The psychologist has come up with strong evidence that happiness
in relationships and marriage has less to do with your partner
and more to do with yourself.
Lucas and a group of fellow researchers have found that the
level of happiness or unhappiness that people in relationships
report is no different than what they reported before the
relationship began.
The research, based on a 15-year study of more than 24,000
people in Germany, addresses one of the most intriguing debates
about happiness in relationships...do relationships make people
happier or are happier people more likely to form relationships?
Lucas' study concludes that people have a happiness "set point"
to which they return after marriage and other life events. "Some
people's happiness levels do (permanently) change quite a bit
after they get married but on average people return to where
they were. There are many people who experience really big
changes in their satisfaction, but they are balanced out by the
people who get negative consequences". While Lucas could not say
why some people end up happier in the long run, he said "If you
got a big boost in the three years after marriage, you are
likely to get a boost in the years afterwards. The three years
after marriage are going to predict how happy you are in the
three, four, five years after that."
People's level of happiness may be largely inborn, but many
psychologists also say there are conscious techniques that
people can use to raise their level of happiness.
People who make a point of expressing gratitude for their
blessings, for example, have been shown to feel better than
those who make a practice of being irritable.... "dependable
satisfactions come from constructive activities, ranging from
cleaning up the yard in the spring, to writing a paper or
helping someone in some significant way," said Lykken, a
professor emeritus of psychology.
Lykken also had a warning: "Fearfulness and irritability are
among the thieves of happiness."
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