I Made Happiness You (Now It’s Me)
It can be so easy to pass the responsibility for our own happiness into someone else’s hands.
After all, it stands to reason that if someone can make us very happy, they can also cause us to feel unhappy. We can become so addicted to those feelings of happiness that we can forget that we don’t have to have them to be happy.
I like to blame oxytocin. After all, when we cuddle with another person, our bodies naturally secrete this hormone. It’s what causes us to feel love and attachment. But oxytocin is also what makes up Pitocin, the drug used to stimulate labor for child birth.
Now, I’m not a medical professional, but just a quick search of oxytocin and its Pitocin derivative will tell you that the side effects can include loss of appetite, stomach pain, nausea, and memory problems. Those also sound like the symptoms of both love and heartache, which are sometimes synonymous experiences.
It’s easy to allow these feelings and the hormones that are connected to them to take over, flooding us with strong feelings that aren’t always pleasant.
We love them when it’s all about that floaty, happy feeling, but then we hate them when it all comes crashing down. When the love story comes to a grinding halt, it’s time that we remembered something we may have forgotten: our happiness is not dependent on our relationship status.
When we sign over our happiness to someone else, we forfeit the ability to make ourselves happy, but we also put a pretty big responsibility in someone else’s hands, a responsibility that no one can live up.
It’s not their job to make us happy, any more than it’s our job to make them happy.
Yes, we should want the people we love to be happy, but happiness really is an inside job.
And because happiness is an inside job, it’s not based on external values. It doesn’t come from having a certain…
