Love and Happiness

Here is a excerpt from the Scientific American that a friend of mine posted on facebook.

“What of happiness? Can a relationship lead to happiness? Certainly, it can. Yet the survey suggests that taking care of your own happiness may also be important. Personal happiness was associated with intensity of love, especially for women. In other words, one may think that tending to one’s own well-being through a night out with friends or time at the gym is selfish, but taking responsibility for one’s own happiness has the potential to drastically improve the quality of our relationship. Of course, being intensely in love may also be contributing to the happiness observed. “


I seem to be caught up in a personal dichotomy, which I am I'm sure I share with many others. In my granny glasses, what I expected was that when I found somebody to love, loved happened After the initial hunt and chase to get your loved one, you took care of someone. You met a boy, you got married, and you had children. You took care of them by giving of yourself every day to them. This was not an issue for me. I liked to do that.

What the boys expected was different. They got a job, worked hard, made money became successful and by taking care of themselves, they took care of the wife and family they also had.

Everyone had a clearly defined role. Everyone knew what to expect. But then something happened. Girls didn’t learn to cook and sew, they ventured into what the men were doing. They studied law and economics, got MBA' s and PhD's. They started to go out into the world to work and slowly through the following generations showed everyone that they were just as good as the boys in making money and becoming successful. Hurray, I like this idea too.

Many boys liked this idea too. But I think it was harder for them, and I think with good reason. So no, I am not going to trash men. On the one hand, their girlfriends, wives, mothers became “interesting people.” At the risk of not being politically correct one more time, I am not going to go into all that. What I do want to say and I offer it as something to think about is this: How, when, where do couples manage the expectations they have of each other? How, when, where do the children fit into all of this?

I am all for women working.... and I am also for men working. What I think right now, is that children are getting the short end of the stick, and that really bothers me. I would love to get comments on how to resolve this situation. Most of the time, I hear one of two things: either that children are not as disciplined, hard working and polite as they used to be, or that children today are their parents trophy.

The quest, should you accept it, is to figure out how to bring a balance to your childs life. The power plays don’t exist only in the boardroom right now, it is in the childrens room too. Somehow, I would prefer if was taken out of the childrens room.