Do We Need Lifelong Love to Achieve Happiness?
In the before times, when people convened in person for panel discussions and conferences, I was invited to London to participate in “How the Light Gets In,” a festival of philosophy and music. One of the events was a debate about love, life and being free. The panelists were given the debate questions in advance, so I, an obsessive when it comes to preparing talks or classes or just about anything else, wrote out my responses. That means I can share them with you.
The first question we were asked to address, in no more than three minutes, was: “Do we need lifelong love to achieve happiness? Or would we be happier embracing independence?” The moderator made it clear that “love” meant romantic love.
Three Answers to the Question about Happiness and Love
Here’s what I said in response to the question:
I have three points to make.
First, to answer this question, I want to rescue love from the stifling, little box we’ve stuffed it into. Love is so much bigger than just romantic love. Love has a huge heart. It throws its arms around close friends, cherished relatives, maybe even spiritual figures. The love that lives in those relationships is sometimes made of sterner stuff than the flimsy romantic variety that can burn ravenously and then just fizzle.
Any of these many-splendored colors of love can contribute to a happy and fulfilling life.
Second, what happens if you accept my bigger, broader meaning of love? Do we need love in that sense to achieve happiness? That’s the view of life that says that nothing matters more than our relationships with other people. Maybe they don’t have to be romantic relationships, but they have to be some sort of close relationship.
What does that perspective do with people who put some sort of powerful passion at the center of their lives? Maybe it is a passion for social justice, or for scientific achievement, or for artistic creation, or anything else that matters so deeply that everything else – and everyone else – is secondary? I think those people can be very happy and deeply fulfilled. Their lives are full of meaning. (There are other paths to happiness, too.)
Third, love is not the opposite of independence. I have been single my entire life and I have lived alone ever since I finished graduate school back in the Stone Age. I have a lot of independence. And I also have a lot of love. The love I have in my life does not insist that I share a bed or spend time with in-laws or be dragged along as a plus-one at one dreary event after another. Now some of you may cherish having someone in your bed and someone you can count on to be there with you for the tedious social events of everyday life as well as the bigger, happier things. And that’s great. But you know what is also great? That we don’t all have to want the same things. That we can each go for the life that works best for us, that incorporates just the right mix of independence and interpersonal connection.
What the Research Shows
With just three minutes, I didn’t have time to get into the relevant research, but I have shared that here many times before. For example, if you equate getting married with finding love (I don’t), then we have a very solid answer to the question about happiness. As of 2012, there were already 18 studies that followed the same people, year after year, as they went from being single to getting married. Those studies showed that people did not become lastingly happier after they married than they were when they were single.
As for people who stay single, the news is good for them, too. Between the ages of 40 and 85, people who had never married grew more and more satisfied with their lives as they aged. Things are also improving over time, historically. In research that assessed the happiness of lifelong single people for 18 years, starting in 1996, results showed that the people who had never married were more satisfied with their lives in the more recent years than in the earlier years.