I Cannot Make You Happy

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In our happiness-oriented culture, making other people happy is considered a virtuous goal. Making our partners happy, our children happy, our customers happy, our employees happy – it’s all seen as a universal good regardless of context.

You can even see this in quips like “happy wife, happy life”. I burst with laughter when I heard that the first time. It seemed so uncomfortably true!

Now, I feel differently. “Happy wife, happy life” is a condescending stance, to both parties involved.

This might seem like a strange thing to claim. What could be wrong with trying to make a loved one happy?

The words of the modern mystic Thomas Hübl can help shed light on this. A couple of years ago he said something in a lecture that rocked me to my core:

“If I can’t disappoint you, I can’t truly love you.”

This can take some unpacking to fully grasp.

When we are full selves, we will inevitably stretch other people. We will trigger them, annoy them, or disappoint them at times. We can never be fully aligned in our needs and wants with another person. Occasionally we will push people’s buttons. This is unavoidable.

If our focus is on making others happy, then we will twist and contort ourselves into smaller versions of ourselves to prevent that kind of disappointment from happening. We will define the boundaries of our permitted behaviors according to what prevents the other person from being trigged.

This is painful and tiring. It takes energy to keep our authentic responses at bay, and it hurts the soul not to be real. What’s more, it deprives the other person from getting to know our full selves.

Also, if we focus on making others happy, then we are depriving the other person from experiencing the full range of their own emotional life. We are preventing them the chance to be angry, sad, hurt, disappointed. Although it doesn’t necessarily seem like it, we are trying to make sure that they remain smaller than they are.

Only when I allow myself to disappoint you can I truly love you.

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When I try to make you happy, I am attaching my own happiness to your happiness.

When I try to make you happy, I am minimizing myself in order to appear in a particular way, so that you will be happy, so that I can feel OK.

When I try to make you happy, I am preventing you from seeing the full me.

When I try to make you happy, I am not respecting the validity of your human experience. I am treating you like someone who needs to be made happy.

When I try to make you happy, I am saying that you are not OK as you are.

When I try to make you happy, I am not allowing you to be the full you.

When I try to make you happy, I am making both of us unhappy.

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Occasional disappointment and annoyance in other people is the consequence of allowing ourselves to be fully ourselves.

For those of us who grow up in environments where all emotions are welcomed, seen, and respected, we learn this automatically. I do not have to define myself by how others respond to my aliveness. I don’t have to prejudge or constrain myself. People respect my authentic expression. I learn that I can be all of me in all of my glory; how others react is about them, not me. I also know that if I trigger other people, then we will find ways to repair the rupture and emerge from it even stronger together.

But for those of us who grow up in environments where certain emotions are judged as annoying or too much, we learn a different lesson. We learn that it’s better to hold back and push down emotions that aren’t approved of. We learn to judge ourselves for our unpermitted emotions, and start to live behind a mask of judgement, shame, and resentment. We become internally terrorized by the slightest threat of disruption in the relationship, and become masters at walking on eggshells without a sound.

Yet all the while we think we are being empathic and morally good. I’m focusing on the other person’s happiness after all, aren’t I?!

Despite appearances, trying to make others happy is ultimately a narcissistic stance. It’s an attempt to ensure our own OKness at the cost of our own and others’ fullness. Because we don’t know how to be OK with relational disruption, we try to prevent others from feeling anything that could trigger that. It looks like it’s all about you, but it’s actually all about me using you for me.

Integrating and resolving these patterns is therefore crucial for our culture. Whether in schools, families, companies, or cultures at large, when we (consciously or unconsciously) teach our children to make other people happy, then we are unwittingly planting the seeds of an even more narcissistic future to come.

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The alternative to trying to make others happy is to play a different game altogether. It’s about creating the conditions to welcome our aliveness, whatever emotional flavor that might entail. And it involves developing the capacity to stay – to stay grounded, present, connected, even just to physically stay in place — when tensions rise between us.

Rather than focusing on happiness as an outcome, we can set our attention and intention on how we want to be disposed toward life.

I can choose to bring a loving disposition to all of my interactions.

I can choose to honor the energy of my authentic responses in every moment.

I can choose to be here with all of me, always.

Whether our dispositional choices lead to happiness or not is not the point, nor is it ours to say. Life is far too complex for us to know what the outcomes of our actions will be. As the classic mystic Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita says, we should “perform every action sacramentally…and be free from all attachment to results.”

I can only set the intention to orient towards life in a way that honors the life flowing through me in each moment. The rest, as they say, is up to the gods.