Happiness Is...?

Vronsky meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires.

When you read great, older books, one of the things you need to get used to is the formulation of thoughts and concepts which have been parroted in the years since. Things which might seem obvious or concepts which we might have already encountered and accepted are at risk of being dismissed too quickly if we forget the context in which the original author wrote them.

I don't even know if Tolstoy was the first to express the above sentiment; he might have been, he might not have been. I definitely agree with it, though; it's a thought I've encountered several times and one which I can't find fault with. To desire is human, and yet achieving one's desires leads only to a new set of desires. This applies easily to physical phenomena: money, cars, houses and the like. But with relationships it's a little trickier.

Part of the problem, I think, is that people treat the people they have relationships with as objects, as static beings who will always remain the same. People act surprised when other people change, they cite it as a reason for relationships to end, when the reality is, everyone is always changing. Everyone, everything is always in a process of becoming. So by the time you "get" the person that you want, that person has changed, has become someone else. The only thing you've gotten is a shade, a memory of who they were a day, week, month or year ago. Worse yet, in pursuing what they were you are missing out on what they are, on the person standing in front of you.

I watched Bridges of Madison County on Valentine's Day (I inadvertently did a lot of romance-related watching that day, including the When Harry Met Sally commentary), and spent most of the movie pondering whether or not Meryl Streep's character was right - not to feel the way she did, since that can't really be controlled, but in the decisions she made. For those who haven't seen the movie, her character is married with two kids, and meets Clint Eastwood while her family is away for a week. They share a blissful, love-filled 4 days together, at the end of which he asks her to leave with him. She doesn't.

So one of the things I wondered was, is this sympathetic? Do I feel sorry for her character and her decision to stay in a respectful but loveless marriage and life? And in the end, I don't think I did; or perhaps it's more correct for me to say I don't think you're supposed to. Obviously, it wasn't a great situation. But she made her choice, and it was not a bad one; she stayed with the husband who had always taken care of her, who had always provided for her; with the kids she had raised, who she wouldn't have felt right abandoning. The point is made that loving Clint Eastwood's character the way she did was the only thing that allowed her to get through her life on the farm, that her perfect, unfulfilled love gave her the strength to stay, and that had she gone with him, eventually she would have come to hate him. Maybe the only reason she stayed in love with him was precisely because they were never able to be together.

It also makes you think - all those marriages that lasted for so long, how many of them were like that, in how many of them was at least one of the people filled with a secret identity, a secret longing for something more that they hid, how many of them had hidden thoughts that their partner never even came close to knowing? And I don't mean to suggest that you have to know everything about the person you're in a relationship with; in fact, I think there's (or there should be) an essential mystery to other people that you can never truly understand. But there's a difference between completely censoring a side of yourself and the aspects of yourself which are unknowable to anybody other than (sometimes even including?) yourself. How many people today live these sham relationships, pouring their affection into someone who doesn't exist, into someone they've created in their own mind, into some ideal they project onto the other person? What does it say about people if the only way the majority of them can stay together is through suppressing elements of their personalities? Is that even true? Am I being a bit harsh? I don't even know anyone who's been in a long-term marriage or relationship that I could ask these things to.