"We've all read a thousand articles that say marriage makes you healthier and happier. Umm, no. Many of these studies merely survey married people and single people, compare the happiness levels, find that the married people are doing better, and crow "See? Marriage makes you healthy and happy." But that's committing an error called "survivorship bias." If you want to determine if getting married makes you happier, you need to include separated, divorced, and widowed people in with the currently married, not with the unmarried...
A 2010 study from Australia even said previous research probably underestimated just how happy people in happy marriages are. But the flip side is even more damning than you may have guessed. A study of medical records of five thousand patients analyzed the most stressful life events people deal with. Divorce came in #2 (Death of a spouse was number one.) Divorce even beat going to prison."
Without institutional obligations, the upkeep of friendships require must be very deliberate...
However, the weakness of friendship is also the source of its immeasurable strength. Why do true friendships make us happier than spouses or children? Because they're always a deliberate choice, never an obligation...
Someone does not cease to be your parent, boss, or spouse because you stop liking them. Friendship is more real because either person can walk away at any time. Its fragility proves its purity.
"...the most wonderful form of crazy that love brings: idealization... A 1999 study showed that people in happy relationships spend five times as long talking about their sweetheart's good qualities as bad. As Robert Seidenberg said, "Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in."
...Realism may be accurate, but it's our illusions that foretell our happiness in love. And the more crazy, the better. People who idealized their partner the most felt no decline in relationship satisfaction over a study of the first three years in marriage.
...When researchers ask people in the throes of infatuation about their partner's downsides, they can recognize and identify the bad stuff... But they emotionally discount the negative: it's not a big deal. Or those flaws are even "charming." This attitude helps grease the wheels of a relationship"
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Ironically, even the most noted researcher in the field of grit, Angela Duckworth, agrees with this. In her paper “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” she says, “A strong desire for novelty and a low threshold for frustration may be adaptive earlier in life: Moving on from dead-end pursuits is essential to the discovery of more promising paths.
By engaging in cognitive reappraisal, and telling ourselves a different story about what is happening, we can subvert the entire willpower paradigm. Some research has shown that willpower is like a muscle, and it gets tired with overuse. But it only gets depleted if there’s a struggle. Games change the struggle to something else.
Michael McMains found that police made three big mistakes when it came to dealing with crisis incidents: they made everything black and white, they wanted to solve things immediately, and they didn’t focus on emotions. You and I make the same mistakes. Granted, we’re not dealing with emotionally disturbed people. Actually, hold on. Often we are dealing with emotionally disturbed people; we just call them coworkers and family members. They’re not terrorists making demands (although sometimes it seems like that too). Usually they’re just upset. They just want to be heard.