Michael F. Mascolo Life Coaching

You don’t need others to be happy.
You have to be happy with yourself before you can enter into relationships.
You have to love yourself before you can love others.

Now, like all pearls of cultural wisdom, there is a bit of truth in these aphorisms. But only a bit of truth.
Statements like these come from a very firm truism: Other people cannot make us happy. It is easy for us to
get on the “if only” bandwagon. If only, I had that job… if only I had a larger paycheck… if only he or she
would do… or if only I had Prince or Princess Charming.

Of course, none of these strategies work. Even if there were such a person as Prince or Princess Charming
(there isn’t), and even if you had him or her, he or she cannot not bring you happiness.

But this doesn’t mean that we don’t need other people. In fact, good relationships are one of the most
important elements of happiness (the other two being good health and meaningful work).

You might ask, isn’t that a contradiction?   How can you say, on the one hand, that “other people can’t make
you happy” and then say “good relationships are important for happiness”? There is a key difference
between these two statements.   If we rely on another person to make us happy, then we are at the mercy of
that other person. And that other person will certainly disappoint us.   There is no way that another person
can meet all of our needs or live up to the idealized image that we have of him or her.

However, a “good relationship” is not the same as “another person”. A good relationship involves two people
and the ways in which those two people interact with one another. It involves two people working to meet
each other’s needs, to give each other love, and to accept love from each other. You are part of any
relationship that you have with another person.   And so, in a relationship, it is not the other person who is
making you happy (sad, angry or what have you). It is the relationship itself.

Your relationship that is defined by what you do in relation to your partner and what your partner does in
relation to you, and what the two of you decide to do in relation to each other.

What are the joys that can come from a relationship? There are many: The joy of being loved; the joy of
working on joint life projects; the joy of nurturing each other. All of these are important elements of a loving
relationship. A good loving relationship functions to meet many of our interpersonal needs. However, there
is yet another joy that comes from a good relationship, and it is perhaps the most important one.

This is the joy of loving. What does it mean to love someone? At its most basic, loving someone means
valuing another person for who he or she is.   Now, what do we do with things that we value? Well, we want to
be near them; to be close to them. We want to take care of them. If the “thing” we value is another person,
we also want to nurture the other person; to support the growth and development of the other. We want to be
intimate with the other person. This involves knowing the other deeply (and having him or her know you).

And so, if loving another person is a fundamental part of a good relationship, it becomes even clearer how a
person cannot do this by him or herself.   Genuine loving is about the other person.   This is true even though
loving another person brings many happy returns. Yes – when we love, we often get love in return. But this
is not why we love. Our love is still about the other person. As a result, we cannot value, care for, be intimate
with, support and nurture the other person by ourselves. You can’t be in a relationship by yourself. And you
can’t create the joys that come from a relationship by yourself. We need the other to love!

None of this is to say that relationships are easy.   Like happiness itself, relationships are serious business.
They take hard work, giving and taking, conflict, efforts to resolve conflict, sacrifice, and all sorts of strong
joys and pains. But in the end, we are neither rocks nor islands. It is equally true that it is through our
relationships that we are able to give of ourselves and that we are able to develop and become better
persons in ourselves.

In future columns, we will explore specific ways of thinking about how relationships can bring about sustained
happiness, even when things get difficult.   We will examine what makes for a good relationship, the types of
roadblocks that can arise in a relationship, and how to repair difficulties in relationships.

It helps to think that we can’t really go wrong if we heed the wise words of E. M. Forster (Howard’s End): “only
connect”.

Finding Happiness In and Through Relationships
Michael F. Mascolo, Ph.D.

Michael F. Mascolo, Ph.D.

Life and Relationship Coaching