I Want You to be Happy

What makes you happy? What makes others happy? What is the possibility of the answer for these two questions being the same? Happiness is like the soothing melody of birds chirping. We all hear it and feel it differently. It is there around us but when we go chasing to see from where we hear the sound and which bird is it, it flies away.  Chasing happiness will not lead us to happiness. Feeling the peace in the moment makes us happy and feelings are personal, and custom made. They vary from individual to individual. Then how do we make others happy? Can we define what happiness means to someone else? Can the foundation of any relationship be: “I want you to be happy”?

I once asked my cousin after his marriage, “how is life?” He casually replied to me saying, “I am trying to balance everything”. This is the way we are expected to deal with life and all our relationships: Maintain Balance. Be it work-life balance, or balance between in-laws and parents, or wife and mother or school and extracurricular activities etc. Our ultimate goal in maintaining this balance is to ensure that no one is hurt, and everyone is happy. When I think about this balancing act, the image created in my mind is, me walking on a rope with a stick in my hand where at both the ends I have my loved ones. When I focus on their happiness there is always a possibility that I lose control on myself. But when they are at the two ends of my balancing stick, how do I even know what makes them happy?!

We always think we know what our loved ones want. Mother always thinks she knows what makes her child happy, husband thinks going on vacation, gifting gold and diamonds makes wife happy, children think parents only want grades and a good job to showcase the trophy to the society and they make them happy and the list is endless with all our relationships. But if you ask that person a simple question: “what makes you happy?” the answer will be “your happiness”. If every relationship lies on the other person’s happiness, then why are we defining someone else’s happiness and then convincing ourselves that this is what they want and keep saying to ourselves “I want you to be happy” unknowing what is their happiness.

My birth meant the world to my mother. She started living in the world which consisted of me and her. Her ultimate goal in life is for to be happy. As I grew up, she expressed that with me too and I believed that my happiness is what my mother wants. I never learnt that my mother can be happy even without me because she does have a life of her own as an individual where she is something else other than being my mother. I would not like she having fun with her friends because then I am bored and I am not happy. So, if I who is her world is not happy, how can she be happy? This is always a puzzle for kids because every time we talk to them, we never share our other world with them. We like to be part of their whole life because we gave birth to them, but we don’t give access to them to be part of our whole life. So, they are always ignorant of who and what their parents are as individuals. They only know us as their parents. Our relationship with our kids is always 50% partnership which we make them believe is 100% and when they realise this, they feel cheated and start hiding their 50% from us and then the balancing act begins.

Have you ever told your loved ones: I want to be happy and then the conversation ending in you being happy? This is very rare because we are made to believe when we think about our own happiness, then we are selfish. Self-awareness and selfishness are always misunderstood because very few people are self-aware of their own feelings, emotions and individuality which when expressed is often accompanied by arrogance because we pre-decide that we will be misunderstood. The safe way to project a good acceptable image in a relationship is to say: “I want you to be happy”. Back of the mind there will be an expectation that the other person should also give the same importance to my happiness. Instead of having a guessing game in the relationship why can’t we say “I want both of us to be happy in our relationship”? If the definition of happiness differs then find a way to meet at the midpoint and if they are the same, then enjoy together. When we share our definition of happiness with our loved ones that shows how strong our bond is with each other.

Hesitation should never be a building block of any relationship. When you say, I want you to be happy, knowingly or unknowingly you start building pressure in your relationship. Humility should be the key to your expression. Grace, respect, and gratitude always guides us in the right direction.

            Grace in your behavior
            Respect in your communication
            Gratitude in your expression
will make your conversation the foundation of your relationship. When you start the guessing game of finding the other person’s happiness, then every conversation will be a court room drama where one will be a lawyer and the judge at the same time and every memory will be dismissed by the judgement passed by the blind folded judge called “LOVE”.

When we say “I want you to be happy”, we never ask what will make you happy?
When we say “I want you to be happy”, we never think, will that cost someone else’s happiness!
When we say “I want you to be happy”, we never want to believe we are not part of that happiness.

Happiness is a choice which we choose based on the definition we give in our life. Don’t make happiness a quiz question for your loved ones. Make the foundation of your relationship with “let’s be happy together”. Never leave yourself out of your own relationship by saying “I want YOU to be happy”. We all want to be happy and in any relationship ”I” matters as much as “YOU”. When one is heavier than the other, then there is never a balance in that relationship which we always look for.