happiness & relationships paper

When it comes to happiness and your love life, you'll find that the beliefs you had about it as a child will drastically change as an adult. As a child you are conditioned to view love a certain way. Through media and our parents, love and happiness are viewed more like a fairytale then a way to live. Having spent years expecting love to be one way causes people to mishandle it and ruin perfectly functional relationships. If people allowed room for error, then perhaps they could be happier in their relationships.

As a child you are raised to believe there's a perfect person for everyone. You believe this because of what you have learned through the years. As a young child you hear fairytales and watch disney movies. How do the movies usually go, an evil with puts a princess under a spell that can only be broke by true loves kiss? (Snow white, sleeping beauty). Or even in some, the young girl gets captured and is forced to deal with a somewhat abusive male figure, because in the end she'll love him regardless (Beauty & the Beast) (Ben-Shahar p 116). This is how were conditioned to view love, either that one day some perfect fictional person is going to come along and make everything right or that to find true love, you have to suffer.

Due to being raised with these beliefs effects a persons current day relationships. Since you're raised to believe that your prince charming or that one special person is coming along forces one to expect people to live up to unrealistic standards. Also, something psychologist Dan Gilbert describes as the "impact bias", the error we make in determining how long something will affect us, plays a big part in relationships (qtd. in Gertner 8). Due to this we might leave someone who is perfect for us for someone who we just think will make us happier because of lust. A lot of the time too people will go to another person because that person makes them feel "validated", praised. (Ben-Shahar p 119). Despite this, it is more often shown that the biggest key to having a flourishing happy relationship is truely knowing someone and loving them regardless, its even more likely to keep the relationships interesting (Ben-Shahar p 120).

Other then the few people those childhood beliefs may work for, most people find their healthy happiest relationships because they learn to view love differently. When people are more releastic about how a relationship should work its easier to function in one. Also, when many people stop doing what Dan Gilbert describes as "miswanting", the act of mistaking what will give us pleasure (qtd. in Gertner 8). If you can stop pushing someone away because of some unreachable standard, you could actually get to know someone for who they are. People in the most functioning relationships have let go of the standard and jus been honest about love. Once you drop the old fashioned ideas and get to really know someone, you can fully appreciate someone for who they are and find happiness with them.

If you look at love the way you did as a child, most of the time you're only setting yourself up for dissapointment. Despite what the media leads you to believe love isn't all about unreleastic expectations and happy fairytale ending. Its about love, compromise, and accepting someone for what they really are. If people can let go of their predetermined beliefs on love, then it will be easier for people to find happiness in their relationships.