What Being Left For Another Woman Taught Me About Happiness

Why no one makes us happy and why that’s a good thing

I came home from work one late, sunny Spring evening to find my partner Chris cooking spaghetti, with a bag packed by the back door and intentions of leaving me after draining the noodles.

“I’m not happy,” he said. As if these three words were enough to explain what seemed to me to be an out of the blue decision to walk away from the life we had built together for nearly eight years.

I asked what it was that was making him so unhappy, but I struggled to understand the threads of his responses.

“You make me unhappy”, he ultimately said.

Themes included that I wasn’t productive enough – I’d wanted to write a book by 30 and here I was at 32, sans anything resembling a draft. I was too conventional now, having traded in dreams of a year-long backpacking trip through South America for a house in the suburbs with him. I wasn’t enthusiastic enough about some of his interests, like super hero movies, craft beer, or metal music and my hobbies were now too boring for him – he dubbed my time spent planting my first-ever garden at the house we’d only recently bought together “parochial”.

I asked if his unilateral decision to go had anything to do with a woman at work who he had been spending a lot of time with recently. “Partly”, he said, as he left with his toothbrush and phone charger from beside the bed…