There’s an old saying that’s been around forever: “A happy wife makes a happy life.” A more inclusive version might be, “A happy spouse leads to a happy house.” Or even, “When both are glad, things aren’t so bad.” I happen to love these kinds of reminders. One in particular—“to compare is to despair”—has helped me navigate countless temptations to make myself miserable by focusing on all I don’t have.
The point is this: happiness in a relationship isn’t a destination you reach and settle into forevermore. It’s something you cultivate through mutual respect, affection, and the shared struggle of ordinary life. When my wife and I got married, we crafted our own ceremony. I had never been married before. She had, and brought two wonderful children into our new blended family. Our wedding reflected not just our love, but our realities—spiritual, cultural, and familial. It was beautiful.
While some of the finer details of that day have blurred with time, one moment remains vivid. I sang a song by the late, great Bob Blue called “The Ballad of Erica Levine.” One line from it has stayed with me ever since:
“A happy-ever-after life is not the kind they got,
But they tended to be happy more often than not.”
What I’ve learned in the thirty-five years since I sang that little ditty is that fairy tales promise happily ever after. But in my very ordinary, human world—where coffee gets cold, mortgages are due, and vows stretch across decades—this line sums up what makes a marriage both happy and lasting. We keep trying. Sometimes we fail. But we keep trying to fail less—more often than not.
This idea—that happiness isn’t a permanent state but a pattern we return to—echoes in the work of Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. In his book *Stumbling on Happiness*, Gilbert explores why we humans are so bad at predicting what will make us happy. He argues that our memories are flawed and our imaginations clouded by present emotions. We remember the sunset picnic but forget the flat tire, the Costco lines, or the bee sting that sent little Oliver to the ER. We forget those things not because they didn’t happen, but because we long to be happy, and our minds reshape the past to serve that longing.
We do this with relationships, too. We imagine a life together that filters out the awkward silences, the misunderstandings, the days when we’re not our best selves. We project a seamless future built on a selective past. But happiness in a real relationship comes not from fantasy—it comes from resilience.
That’s where the research of John and Julie Gottman offers clarity. They don’t focus on happiness per se, but on emotional connection, trust, and communication. Their decades of observing real couples have shown that the healthiest relationships are built on small, daily gestures of appreciation, affection, and attention—not on sweeping romantic highs. One of their most powerful findings is the so-called “magic ratio”: five positive interactions for every negative one.
What the Gottmans offer isn’t a fairy tale—it’s a practice. And it’s one that, done with care, leads not just to staying together, but to staying in love.
Observations like this feel obvious and yet are so easily forgotten in the glow of fairy tale romance. Don’t get me wrong—I love a good fairy tale as much as anyone. I just try to build my life on a foundation of mutual support, effort, and grace. At least, I try to do this more often than not. And I’m willing to call that happiness.
After all, it was Mark Twain who purportedly said, “To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.”