I had a conversation about 6 weeks or so ago with a friend about happiness; specifically about what responsibility we have toward loved ones -- friends, spouses, family members -- and their happiness. One of the things we agreed on was that the individual is responsible for his or her own happiness, and no one else can make you happy.
Since then, I've been just allowing things to percolate around in my brain (ok, so sometimes I take a while percolating.) A few personal incidents have been making me question my own relationships and happiness, and I've been having... not exactly a crisis of faith, but... Well, the military lifestyle can take a huge toll on long-term relationships, just in general, and adding in multiple deployments, kids, and post-traumatic stress, it can make you question everything you think you know about yourself and your life.
So, while I don't disagree that I (or anyone else) has no responsibility for another's actual feeling happy, I do question how much of a responsibility we bear toward helping those we love find and experience those things that can make them happy. Also, how much are we willing to sacrifice of our immediate happiness? In other words, how much of my happiness is affected by my husband and kids being happy, as well? What is the compromise, and how can it be reached?
My current lifestyle as a military spouse and a Stay-at-home parent are a huge example of the compromises I've made in the interest of someone else's happiness. My husband and I met in the Washington, DC, area. He's 11 years older than I am, so he was fairly well established, while I was burned out from college and taking a year off to reevaluate my choices and major. Long story short, rather than going back to school, I found myself married and a mother. Things were good for a couple of years, but I was from a way small town in southwest Virginia, and the DC area ended up making me incredibly stressed out. I just couldn't take the people and the traffic. My husband saw that I was trying -- and failing -- to cope, and we decided that we'd move back to my hometown. We lived with my parents for far too many months, until he and I had both found and trained for new jobs, and found a house and a babysitter and all that fun stuff. And then I got pregnant again.
The problem with where we were is that there aren't a lot of jobs, and the ones that there are, are usually labor-intensive, involving many long hours, and occasionally dangerous conditions. Pay isn't great, and benefits are nearly non-existent. And after the appearance of Baby#2, we realized that my paycheck plus a bit was going to be completely swallowed by childcare. At that point we had to reevaluate the working situation -- our choices were to cut extras down to nothing and me stay home with the kids (which we could afford, with just barely enough left over for the occasional splurge) or for me to find a second job, which would mean that we'd need after-hours care for the kids (which would probably have been provided by my parents and sister) and that we'd never see each other because Hubby was working roughly 14 hour days, 6 days a week. All things considered, me staying home seemed like the best option. I loved being home with my kids, and when they got to be a bit too much for me, we were just a few miles down the road from my parents; I could just dump everyone in the car and run out to Mom's office or to their house for enough of a change of scenery to keep me sane.
But the hours and the lack of benefits were wearing on us. Years before, when he was fresh out of high school, Hubby did a stint in the Army, where he was able to drive a tank. He's always always been fascinated by tanks, but there's not exactly a lot of call for those skills in the civilian world. So after much talking and stressing, we finally decided that, yes, it would be hard, but his passion was in the military. So we started the long journey back to the military.
Being a military spouse is a totally different world. A lot of the military wives I've met (I haven't met many husbands because heavy armor units are exclusively male -- female soldiers are office support staff) are military brats themselves and knew what they were getting into. Others married their spouses at the beginning of their service and learned along with their soldiers. I was completely switching up my life, and I still feel like I'm behind the learning curve (not a comfortable place to be for the girl who messed up all the grading curves in school).
I don't regret choosing my husband's needs over my own wants (luckily we've been in places with enough of a small town feel for me, while being close enough to the kinds of things my husband is into to keep us both reasonably happy in downtime). On the other hand... Being in the military hasn't exactly guaranteed Hubby's happiness. Our first posting had him, not on tanks, but on a Stryker MGS. At our current posting, he was actually able to be on a tank, but had issues with some of his superiors, so it really is all about attitude and determination -- all the things he hated about the old unit were suddenly viewed through rose-colored glasses.
Lately, though, I've been missing my own family and friends (most of whom I've managed to stay in touch with via Twitter/Facebook) and a life-course that I plotted for myself. The ironic thing about this is that my life-course, as plotted by me, was already off-track by the time I met my husband, and I still haven't really figured out which track to get it back on. And, yeah, I've been thinking about all the things that aren't right in my marriage. And it's a lot of pretty heavy stuff. So I decided to look back at what was good, and think about whether or not we could get back there.
You know what? I think we can, but it's gonna take a lot of hard work from both of us. And the first, and hardest, part is gonna be just plain bringing it up. But if that's what I need to do to be happy? Yeah, it's not as hard as being NOT happy.
So, no, I can't make him happy. But having the power to help him find the way to happiness, and knowing that I have the ability to deny him that happiness? That's a HUGE thing. And I have a responsibility, in the spirit of the vows we made when we got married, to help him figure out what he needs. And if it's within my power to help him reach for those things, I have a responsibility to do that, too.
I am in control of my own happiness. I am choosing to share my happiness with my husband by helping him find his own. Our lives are so intertwined that it seems cold and sterile to imagine NOT being a part of his journey. Marriage has created a double helix of us, like a strand of DNA, and we are joined as we wind around and around a central axis. And when we lose the cohesiveness of our relationship, we damage the very fabric of ourselves. We may seem oddly suited (in truth, we are VERY oddly suited!) for each other, but I cannot take my happiness at the expense of his, any more than he can take his at the expense of mine, and still expect the relationship to survive. And if I feel we're slipping apart, I have a responsibility to bring that to our mutual attention, so we can decide how we can save it.
My happiness isn't dependent on his, but they're certainly linked.
(After all, most of my happiness can be found inside a good book, with a glass of tea and a cat on the side.)
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