Chronicles of Chaos
Women’s Happiness –The Survey Results Are In
Sometimes when the door is open I walk into Amelia’s room with her laundry and find her in the closet, admiring herself in the mirror. She stops as soon as she sees me, but not before I get a glimpse of her beaming smile and sparkling eyes. Or her angry eyebrows as she tries on a mean face. I remember doing the same as a girl–experimenting, practicing, checking out how cool I am. Now when I look in the mirror I stand there for maybe three minutes. I search for imperfections–dark eye circles, flat hair, the outfit that doesn’t work. I’m always fixing. I watch Amelia’s curiosity and delight in her reflection and think about how skewed my perspective has become. I love her mirror time. What did I do with all that I’m fabulous good stuff?
Arianna Huffington is asking some of the same questions. She recently announced The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling. According to over 30 years of surveys, married, single, mothers, rich or poor, women are less and less happy worldwide. Our happiness has been on a downward trend since the early 1970s, right after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Black women are the only ones polling as happier, but not as happy as black men. We’ve got more choices, better options and less joy. Meanwhile, to add salt in the wound, men are reportedly getting happier.
Other than the happy man part, I’m not surprised. We all know what’s going on out here. Over the next few weeks, former Gallup researcher, author and father of a daughter, Marcus Buckingham (Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently) takes a closer look at these issues in his articles on Huffington Post. Buckingham explores the surveys confirming our anecdotal evidence and then will reveal how we can in fact be happier.
Buckingham points out in his first post, What’s Happening to Women’s Happiness, that women start out happier than men. As we get older, we slip until at age 47 we’re officially unhappier than men. Michael has been onto this phenomenon. We’ve recently emerged from the dazed years of getting up in the night with little kids to discover our middle agedness, so we’ve been holding our own two person happiness forums. Michael explains that women’s happiness sinks in their 40s because they realize men can still catch younger women. Like seniors dating freshmen, our male peers have a new kind of appeal at the same time that women, with our wrinkle creams and laser treatments, suddenly see AARP on the horizon. Men are becoming more visible while we fear being less so.
I understand this dynamic. It feels a little like when my labor with Amelia started in the middle of the night and it struck me that giving birth was going to hurt quite a lot and Michael, sleeping beside me, would feel absolutely no pain whatsoever. Women may suffer this realization about men’s studliness more deeply in our 40s, but it’s not why we’re discontent. Women are unhappy because we’re overwhelmed and underinspired. We crack in our 40s (39 for discontent with marriage) because those midlife years mark our tipping point.
Buckingham says we’re not worn out from working longer hours than men. Apparently, men are doing more housework and childcare so that women and men work the same hours everyday, with women more at home and men at work. I’m not convinced he’s got the facts right on this point. Even if the working hours are even, women still struggle to prove we can do both career and home life to the right degrees. And, men get attaboys for leaving work early to coach little league.
Kids seem to be a complicating factor for happiness. Adding her own commentary to the unhappy women subject in Blue is the New Black, Maureen Dowd quotes Wharton professor Betsey Stevenson (The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness) who explains, “Across the happiness data, the one thing in life that will make you less happy is having children. It’s true whether you’re wealthy or poor, if you have kids late or kids early.” Stevenson goes on to say that no one regrets having kids, or thinks kids are the source of their unhappiness. Nothing’s bad about parenting, it’s just so much.
I often read about the importance of supporting girls’ confidence as they get older. For women there may be a distinction between confidence and valuing the self. We can be confident as mothers, wives, and/or women in the world, and feel unhappy. I sense though if we place greater value on ourselves, look in the mirror to discover who we are, what we’re good at and enjoy doing most, and then create time, demand it in our lives, to pursue those things that we would be happier, and confident too. This shift in perspective and pursuits may not be easy, given our responsibilities and the expectations we put on ourselves. I do believe we have the strength and willpower, if we can just let ourselves become more self-centered.
Last spring, Michael dropped the kids off at school–Amelia and Wyatt at elementary and Oliver for preschool–then drove to work and sent me an email he called “Mothering and Fathering”. He wrote:
Someone needs to write a positive not negative piece on the myth of it all. The great part about kids, but what you give for it. I see these moms at the kids’ school, at Oliver’s preschool, on the sidewalk pushing strollers, juggling like you say your friends are, and I have to say it looks like an unwinnable game for smart, accomplished and educated women. Men are either dealing the best they can or pressing eject or trying to be good partners. It is hard, and at times too much, and sometimes miserable. We have got to recalibrate the whole deal, to get more focused on how we want to live with the kids and each other and start doing more of that (even if it is perspective adjustment and some practice/ritual to keep reminding us). Otherwise I fear we will look back (we will anyway but maybe not so much) and say, man that went by so fast I wish…you can fill in that sentence.
Buckingham’s next post is Women’s Happiness: What We Know for Certain.
great article, kelly!