Other People Can’t Make You Happy
But we keep repeating the myth as if it might one day be true.
I wonder how many times a well-meaning parent has turned to their grown child and asked, “Do they make you happy?” Because good parents only want their kids to be happy.
How many times do we tell young people to grow up and love whomever “makes” them happy? It’s what we think we’re supposed to say, and we say it as if it’s all that matters.
The words love and happy are so often intertwined just because we can’t resist mixing them together. We say, “I love this or that” when what we really mean is “I feel happy.”
That little lingual slip reinforces this notion that other people can turn on some switch to make us happy regardless of whatever else is going on. But if we actually want to “be happy?”
Then we’ve got to get real about our personal happiness. Because, that’s the thing. It’s personal.
In fact, happiness is not so much a feeling as it is an individual disposition. Even when we say that we feel happy, or that so-and-so makes us happy, what we’re really talking about is joy.
