Time magazine says I’m unhappy. And if you’re a woman, according to them, so are you.
Sometimes, I think I ought to chuck the whole writing thing and become a researcher investigating the myriad reasons women’s lives are so shitty. Magazines and universities seem to be working around the clock to inform us dames how depressed we are. How infertile we become each day. How gaining too much weight during pregnancy will make us fat for the rest of our lives. How men don’t like smart chicks and are intimidated by successful ones.
How females are more likely to die by violence in the home. How we need to behave like men to be taken seriously in the work place. And if you’re a black woman, sorry, but you’re more apt to be single all your life and get breast cancer.
Good times. And they wonder why we get a bit crabby.
In “The State of American Women,” Time lists poll results showing the great strides women have made in education, business and government, and the mostly encouraging numbers of men and women who are glad about it. Still, we’ve never been more miserable and Time can’t figure out why.
In search of an answer, I propose researchers attempt to prove one of the following theses:
- women have discovered how much it blows to work seventy hours a week for a company that’d lay you off at the drop of a hat, steal your retirement and buy their CEO a jet, or
- trying to fit a family, fulfilling career and happy marriage into a 24-hour day is actually quite challenging, or
- good luck actualizing your true self and relating healthily to a man in a culture that values competition, emotional distance and unbridled self-interest, or
- forced to look at a relentless stream of American Apparel ads, women feel bad about their bums, or
- being in a loveless marriage or remaining single when you don’t want to be is isolating and heartbreaking, no matter how often people tell you to “embrace your aloneness,”
or simply
- life, turns out, is hard.
My first response to the article, after reading similar reports in other magazines, was “screw you, Time! I’m so happy, I’ve got blue birds flying out of my ears!” But then I reconsidered. Am I unhappy? Actually, kinda…maybe?
See, I don’t think happiness means every moment of your life is free of difficulty and everything you want falls at your feet. And I believe people who say, “I’ll be happy when I have a partner, a snazzier office, a six-figure paycheck,” etc., might achieve their goals then still want to take a flying leap off the Sears Tower.
About five years ago, I was sitting in bed crying my eyes out over a love affair going through a rough patch. At the time, I was living in Europe and so enjoying lots of adventure and self-discovery, I had a job I found energizing because it used every corner of my brain and connected me with cool people, I had great friends and was jazzed by a book I was writing.
Thus, in the midst of my agonized cries, I was only slightly surprised to hear myself say, “I am so happy.” I was in love and feeling intensely. My work fulfilled me and left time to enjoy the rest of life. I was nurturing loving friendships and savoring my own creative juices. Though I still hoped certain things would evolve in certain directions, nothing I had any control over would I have changed. I was walking the path I wanted to be on.
But life changes, things happen and, well, I don’t know if I can say that anymore. But really, how many people can? No matter how educated we are, how financially stable we try to be, no matter how many ladies are in our government, why is it so hard to stay on the path?
Rather than wondering if we’re happy, I wonder if we might want to ask whether the lives we’ve created for ourselves are even conducive to happiness. How is it possible to feel connected or cared about by a culture that’s often so heartless? How can we experience love when it’s considered something to pin down rather than work at? Where do we find the time to get to know who we really are? And how are we supposed to even afford life nowadays, let alone enjoy it? These are the questions I want Harvard researchers to answer.
Man, we haven’t made things easy. Mere survival is expensive enough. But happiness? Truly priceless.
I’m not sure if you’ve come across this article already but it makes some interesting points about these ‘discoveries’ of modern women’s unhappiness:
http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/1354/barbara_ehrenreich_are_women_g/
I have yet to read the TIME article but at this early stage I’m inclined to agree that much of the origin of this brouhaha can be found in marketing strategy.
I also suspect that this links in nicely to some throwback need to encourage women to keep doubting themselves, and to homogenise them – “Women = the unhappy segment of the population”. Your post is aptly titled “Am I Unhappy?”, as opposed to “Am I, as obvious representative of all women existing in 2009, unhappy?” Studies and their interpretations make for curious and entertaining reading for laypeople but this type of finding doesn’t give me anything useful to use in gauging, increasing or trying to understand my own level of happiness. Just as the statistics that tell us the frequency of various side effects of a given medication doesn’t inform me how my body will respond once I’ve downed the pill.
Hi Laura,
i’m curious about the work life balance you spoke about here. did you feel life there was structured so you were able to enjoy personal life more?
Read Status Syndrome and get back to us….It is all about choices and having choices….
This is a much better article than the one in Broadsheet.
You are a good writer.
seriously: Backlash by Susan Faludi.
i’d send it to you but i don’t have enough money, the thing is huge.
all about how once we ladies get a few steps forward there’s a backlash pushing us down the stairs.
And how often the press, (as experts in absolutely everything because they are the press and obviously impartial) having nothing real to write about, often twists statistics to convince some part of their readship that they’re miserable.
fuck the press, you’re happy. me too by the way.
“And they wonder why we get a bit crabby.”
For women I thought that was only a monthly thing for a few days during the cycle.
My wife does a good job of marking the calendar – in our bedroom – so that I will be prepared for the days when she is… a bit crabby.
I was of the understanding that men were more likely to suffer from depression and/or mental illness, and were far more likely to commit suicide, than women were.
Most of the women I know and work with are actually quite happy, except for those days when their friend comes to visit, so I am inclined to think that the unhappy woman meme is actually a unsubstantiated myth.
I am sure if they did a general study on unhappiness, they would find that everybody (male and female) was from time to time unhappy, but that men were more unhappy in their lives than women were.
Unhappiness is a state of mind that one can choose to work through, or allowed themselves to be crushed by.
I got a great wife, two great kids, good health, an active sex life, and friends, so I choose to be happy, rather than down about impending layoffs, my mortgage payments, my balding head, my disappearing abs, or FOX NEWS and the Republican Party.
Svutlov
On one hand, surely it appears that life is as complex as it has ever been.
Although unjust, when roles were defined more narrowly in past generations, was it not less complicated?
Are complexities and stress the prices of freedom? Freedom from narrow cultural roles for women… and men in fact.
I don’t have a clear answer. I do know there is no less illness in today’s society than in years gone by. We just exchanged things like polio and tuberculosis for depression, obesity, and addiction.
And with few barriers to exodus, relationships provide little emotional security. On one hand, it was extreme to shame and ostracize a walk-away spouse. Today, we are way over on the other hand where walking away for any reason encounters virtually no social resistance. Or any other resistance. Yet I can’t see that the pain of the one left behind, particularly children, is an less. It is hurtful to an extreme and costly to an extreme.
Yet I am not without hope. I am glad to have found a woman who I share values with. She has a career, she has children, and she has our marriage. Balance is not easy…. I have children and a career too.
As you say… happiness does not mean being happy every moment of the day. We certainly do not experience that. We do still experience a lot of happiness though. Just not constant. To us, this is a reasonable expectation.
I don’t know how to recommend finding this for anyone else. I simply believe that it is still out there. The balancing act may be harder to achieve. However, there is more help in doing so today than at any other time in recorded history.
One thing my wife and I do is keep a realistic perspective on what expectations are projected onto us by our culture, particularly the entertainment and fashion industries.
We take care of our health and fitness, but we are cautious not to adopt the unrealistic values and expectations served up to us. This is not easy. But I think we have found what works for us. My post on CSI Miami is all about this… http://yuppieaddict.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/unreal-comparisons-csi-miami-sets-us-up-for-failure/
Again, we are not perfect. My wife does struggle with body image issues and I am a recovering alcoholic. Yet we both feel we are gaining tremendous ground in our respective recoveries.
I guess the bottom line is I can see the frustration you refer to. I would also like to offer the encouragement that I believe a sensible balance in life and the happiness that goes with it are out there.
It just takes a different set of efforts to find and maintain happiness than in the past.
Ciao.
Chaz
I love women, and women that are woman and that act like women. I am a man, and I am a manly man. I don’t plan on beating my wife, nor “abusing” her, which nowadays is defined to include things like yelling. What I think is wrong is simple, women are no longer being women, and for that, real men are no longer being real men, so when a woman, who is not a real woman dates a man, who is not a real man, they are left not satisfied with each other, why? Because opposites attract, yes, even in gay relationships, one has to act like a woman for their relationship to work. That’s just how the world is, velcro sticks to furry items, furry items don’t stick to themselves.
To all the young girls out there, don’t listen to all this liberal propaganda, you know what is best for you, and how to live your life.
Funny, which philosopher has ever said that when a societies men become effeminate, and women masculine it vanishes? Well, I think that as women become more feminist, they vanish, because they end up not procreating and having children, same goes for men too. How is that for Evolution? Perhaps these ideas existed in the past, many time periods too, but its believer just simply never procreated and their stories and ideas died with them! Oh the irony…