Can We Ever Be Happy?

I used to ask myself this question. Over and over. It seemed that every time I started to revel in feeling happy, something got in the way: a look, a word, a motion, another thought, an inability of another to listen.

That discord seemed to me, at one point, to be normal. After all, my parents fought all the time and they still loved each other very much. But I discovered that the families I lived with in college were different, and I know I used to say that it would be different for me because I had seen their examples.

My first marriage was built on love but we were both not ready for marriage. We fought. A lot. And I just thought that was normal. At some point, I realized that it wasn't normal and I divorced my first husband. He moved into Boston to be near BU where he taught law classes. I stayed at home to tend to our daughter. She stayed with me until she was in high school, and then she decided she would like to live with her father. I told her that I couldn't keep the house if she left, and that I would be moving out of state when she went to live with her father. "I don't care," she said. "Go wherever you want to go. I am never coming back to you."

She has kept that promise. Oh, we had some great times after she married (and we went to Boston to put her wedding together; her father didn't come to her wedding); we had great times after her children were born and I went to help her. And that went on for almost 14 years.  

At one point, after my breast cancer and the use of one of my body parts for a breast, I was told that I should not fly anymore because of the way them put me back together, my arms could become about three or four times their regular size and they would stay that way.

Several years after my first marriage ended, I met someone else, and remarried. And I found that peace, that common love, that holds people together.

Years later, I was talking with my first husband, and I told him that I had learned an important lesson: Love does not hurt. "Ever," I said, "if it does, it is something else, some incompatibility, some intervention because love itself does not hurt."

More recently, I learned another lesson: love, fun, any positive emotional investment should not hurt. Whether it is a relationship, an activity, a volunteer effort, a hobby: none of these things should hurt. These are the foundations of our emotional happiness. If they hurt, if someone else refuses to be happy with us, that is more about the incompatibility of people than it is an indictment against being who you are.

And that knowledge has helped me immensely.