Your Marriage Shouldn’t Make You Happy

By Michelle Dempsey-Multack

“Don’t ever put your happiness in someone else’s hands. They’ll drop it. They’ll drop it every time.” – Christopher Barzak

Happy? Huh? Not me. At least I wasn’t then. Back when an engagement was sprung on me after just three months of dating. Back when I didn’t have to sit and wonder when the ring would come, because it literally showed up out of nowhere. Back when it seemed like I had it all – the good-looking fiancé, a family willing to throw me a giant, dream wedding laced with enough pave flower centerpieces to fill Buckingham Palace, oh and let’s not forget – that ring!

Back when everyone asked, “Oh my god, aren’t you so HAPPY you’re getting married?!”

“What the hell was wrong with me?,” I wondered, day in and day out. Why didn’t this feel like those proposals you see in the movies, where the beaming bride-to-be bounces through the wedding planning process like a happy little sprite on engagement crack? Where was my montage of emotionally charged happy tears at the bridal store? Why wasn’t this happening for me?

WHY?

It must have been him, right? I mean, it couldn’t have been me. I must have just picked the wrong guy, one who, no matter how hard he tried, couldn’t make me happy. I mean, it’s not like I’ve had this problem before, right?

Wrong. All wrong.

In fact, this was very much my problem and no one else’s – one that I’d had before, too many times to count. Tying myself down to men I shouldn’t have been tied down to, finding myself questioning my own worth, sanity, ability to love, and ending up back at square one over and over again.

Oh, I was broken. That’s why. Broken in a way that would take much more than the promise of a husband to fix. Wounds of my childhood began to rear their ugly head at the end of each honeymoon period of my relationships. The childhood that left me without the love of a father, with little to no self-worth, and ALL of the unresolved issues from my traumas. There was a common theme in my adult relationships. Once the thrill of getting to know each other wore off, once we had consumed enough of each other and felt settled in our existence together, the darkness would rise up through my soul with the same certainty as the sun rising every morning. It was coming, and it would tear me apart.

As if I took a page from the “Daddy Issues for Dummies” handbook, I put the power of my happiness in the hands of whatever relationship I was in at the time. For most of my teenage and adult life, I determined my worth and purpose in this world based on whether or not someone loved me in any way shape or form. Regardless of the nature of the relationship, good, bad, or tragic, I felt as if I could not be an inherently happy person unless that happiness was coming directly from someone else. Unless someone else was loving me, spending time on me, with me, or thinking about me – hell, even fighting with me.

The diagnosis? Emptiness. Loneliness. Ignorance. The cure?

Well it sure as hell wasn’t marriage.

My mom had always said, “For how successful and capable you are in your professional life, you are that much dumber in your relationships.”

And I didn’t want to be that anymore. I wanted to be the girl that could stand on her own two feet, man or not, and smile for no reason. I wanted to be the girl that found more value in being alone than in bad company. I wanted to be loved for who I was, not who I had to be just to keep someone around. I didn’t want to have to be attached to someone to be happy. I wanted that success as easily as it came professionally.

So things were going to have to be different now. This engagement went from marriage to pregnancy all in one short year, and it suddenly dawned on me that this marriage wasn’t going to make me happy. Despite the challenges we faced as a couple, the fact that we were completely unaligned in our values and lifestyles, I was going to have to find a way to be happy on my own, even if my marriage was going to end up imploding.

It was time to accept all that I was and all of that I had been up to that point in time in order to move forward. But finding happiness from within took a whole lot more work than just reading motivational quotes on Instagram. Acceptance is the first step, of course. The first step at the bottom of a long, winding staircase that seemed impossible to climb at that point in time for me.

And let’s face it, my marriage wasn’t making me happy – but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be.

I began breaking down my quest for happiness in day-to-day increments and tackled that staircase one step at a time. I was fixated on thinking about the last time I felt truly at peace and completely fulfilled. It wasn’t so long before giving birth that I had experienced a period of euphoria for a brief moment in time, four months to be exact, where the storm within me calmed and I felt fulfilled just by being alive.

This feeling came from the car accident that had rocked my world just three years earlier, when I was forced to stay in bed for an entire winter. One might have lost their minds over the notion of having to remain bedridden, arms and legs in casts, but strangely, I felt happy as a clam. I realize this may sound completely contradictory to your idea of happiness, but I’ll get to all that. The real shocker here, though? I was completely alone. No relationship to hang my daddy issues-brand hat on. A few friends would visit from time to time, and my mom was by my side to nurse me back to health, but there was certainly no man holding my hand through it all. No daily barrage of texts from an equally insecure dude to make my heart beat. No one to distract from the insecurities that ate me alive. There was none of that.

And through the darkest days of my marriage, I kept reminding myself of the fact that if I could be happy throughout such a debilitating time, I could essentially find happiness in anything. During that time of recovering from my car accident, I kept a journal where I shared my deepest goals and dreams with myself. I cried into that journal on a daily basis as I let go of things from the past that I had to release. I wrote promises to myself, so many of them – ones that I would inevitably break once I was healed and released back into the wild once again.

Remembering that time sent me on a rabid quest to find this journal, when Bella was around 3 months old. My ex-husband had gone out of town to a friend’s wedding without us, and I was feeling especially anxious about the state of our relationship yet steadfastly committed to changing my patterns. At the bottom of my pajama drawer, buried deep beneath old tees and unworn honeymoon lingerie, I found the journal. As Bella lay next to me, napping peacefully in her swing, I tore through the pages that once held me together, like a vulture in search of nourishment.

Two bullet points I had jotted down immediately jumped off the page and grabbed my attention, as if to say “THIS, THIS IS THE SECRET!”:

• Do not fear being alone.
• Focus on one enjoyable alone activity to shift the negative thoughts associated with loneliness into positive actions of alone time.

Without skipping a beat, I read through and rewrote the promises; all of them, starting with the broken ones I thought I’d never fix. I made a list of all that I did during that 4-month period that made me feel so fulfilled – and it wasn’t much more than writing, reading, and watching the Ellen show, but there was one common theme: I was, for once, doing what I needed to do for me and me alone. I was filled with gratitude for not having lost my life in that car accident and for the fact that I would be able to walk again.

So instead of waiting for my marriage to make me happy, and becoming more and more resentful when it didn’t, I harnessed gratitude, became clear about my self-worth, and, pardon my french, began to love the shit out of myself..

What was I grateful for?

Well, that was easy, I was grateful for the ability to have created this child and for the opportunity to raise her. I was grateful that my writing was slowly becoming more of a career than a hobby. I was grateful for living near my family and having their help as a new mom.

What was I worth?

I finally began taking stock in myself. I knew that I wasn’t going to be worthy of anyone else’s love if I didn’t even know my own self-worth, so I wrote long and hard about the parts of myself I considered special. All roads led back to my tenacity and resilience – the fact that I had been through so much yet still, somehow, come pretty far regardless of the adversity I faced.

What would loving myself mean?

How nice, I thought to myself, if I could love myself so hard that I would never need anything else in my life to complete me. If loving myself could be completion in itself.

So I left myself with no choice.

I loved myself through the lowest lows of my marriage. I loved myself as I navigated motherhood, making mistakes and working through challenges as a new mother. I loved myself as I left my career to turn a hobby into a business. I loved myself as my marriage came to an end.

I loved myself as I set out into the world as a divorced 33-year-old mother with a two-year-old in tow, and I was happy. Happy enough to draw criticism from the people who expected me to be torn to shreds by the reality of my new marital status.

I worked hard to own this happiness and to love myself, so much so that it felt like a rebirth. Like I was experiencing life in a whole new way for the very first time. Now that my happiness within finally reached normal levels, it radiated out of me, allowing me to finally attract the right kind of everything in my life; success, deep, meaningful friendships, and eventually a good man. The kind of man I needed for the woman I had become.

I got remarried, confidently this time. I felt sure in my decision because I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I’d be happy in this life with or without my new union. I felt empowered by the fact that my husband’s desire to make me happy is nothing more than a bonus, and no longer the barometer for which I measure my happiness.

And that’s how I learned that your marriage shouldn’t make you happy. YOU should make you happy, and watch that marriage flourish as a result of it all.

A writer, a dreamer, an entrepreneur, and above all things, a mother, Michelle Dempsey turned a passionate hobby into a thriving career. Internationally published and known for her ability to connect with readers on a deeper level, Michelle launched her own business, Michelle Dempsey: Very Well-Written, offering writing and editing services, business coaching, branding expertise, and social media strategy to businesses of all kinds.

She speaks to female audiences regularly on topics including empowerment, personal development, and business success. Michelle has written articles on all of the aforementioned topics for publications including Parents Magazine, Forbes, Scary Mommy, HuffPost, Elite Daily, Daily Business Review, Creative Child Magazine, and mindbodygreen.

A Native-New Yorker with a heart as big as her personality, Michelle has made South Florida her home. As a mommy, stepmom and wife to her second husband, Spencer, Michelle devotes her life to making the people around her feel loved, happy and important. She sits on numerous boards and committees where she volunteers her time to both local and international causes. When she is not writing, she can be found enjoying the outdoors with her family, skiing in Colorado, sweating on a Pilates mat, and indulging in coffee, from sunup to sundown.

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