Couples Who Are Mentally & Emotionally Happy Usually Have One Special Thing In Common
peopleimages | CanvaIs it a case of the grass always being greener? Are married people happier than singles, or are singles happier than the people who exchanged "I do" and vowed to love, honor, and cherish one another till death do them part?
I've coached both, and after enough of these conversations a pattern shows up that has nothing to do with relationship status. The couples who are genuinely happy, the ones who seem lit from the inside rather than propped up, all have one thing in common.
Mentally and emotionally happy couples do one thing differently:
They look inward for their happiness and fulfillment, not at their relationship
They didn't get married and then become happy. They arrived already reasonably content with themselves, and the marriage became a place to bring that rather than a place to go get it.
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They know marriage doesn't equal happiness. It equals security.
This is where most people get confused. Marriage delivers something real, just not the thing it's advertised as delivering. When a woman marries, she gets a title. She becomes a Mrs., and she is societally legitimized. She has someone to take care of and someone who takes care of her. It shows a commitment to the outside world, and even if you're miserable in your married life, you still have a partner you're legally bound to.
That's security. It is not the same as happiness, and treating the two as interchangeable is how people end up bewildered that the ring didn't fix anything.
Meanwhile, "single" still carries a stigma it doesn't deserve, for both men and women, as if the person is somehow incomplete. Men are considered "mama's boys" and women are called "cat ladies".
"Oh, she's the divorced one, poor thing." "Wow, he's still not married? He probably has mommy issues." Society judges fast and without any actual information. Plenty of single women I work with are confident, successful, and perfectly happy making their own decisions without conforming to anyone's timeline.
Emotionally healthy couples don't assume singles are happier
Here's what convinced me this is about where you look rather than what you have.
Married people look at singles and crave the freedom. Pick up and move. Travel somewhere exotic. Date whoever you want. What they're not picturing is the exhausting part, the constant low-grade questions running underneath it all. Is she into me? Am I into him? Will we get married? When will I get over this? Will I ever meet someone?
Singles look at married people and see the steady foundation. Meals together, someone to bring to the wedding, a person waiting at home. What they're not picturing is that the foundation doesn't come with contentment attached.
Both groups are doing the same thing. They're looking sideways at the other arrangement and assuming the answer is over there, which is shown to undermine relationship happiness. And the moment happiness is located somewhere outside you, it becomes something you're always slightly short of.
What happy couples do differently
The couples who have it figured out stopped auditing the other side. They aren't measuring their marriage against an imagined single life or against anyone else's marriage. They brought a settled sense of themselves into the relationship, which means the relationship gets to be a good thing in their life instead of the source of everything good in their life.
That's a very different job to hand a partner. One is a companion. The other is a rescue mission, and nobody performs well under that assignment.
Marriage is also not what it was thirty years ago. Women's independence means we can genuinely have it all on our own terms. We can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan and have babies without a spouse if we choose to.
There's a massive societal shift underway in first-world countries, and watching it happen has been remarkable. Which makes the internal work more important, not less. When marriage stops being the thing you need, what's left is the thing you actually want, and that only works if you brought something to it.
If you have a wonderful partner who adds joy to your life, that's incredible. But the joy has to have somewhere to land.
Maya Ezratti is a Certified Rules Dating & Relationships Coach. She coaches men and women on how to remove the desperation and frustration from dating, romance, relationships, and marriage.
