Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness

by Kathryn Schulz

Every couple fights, of course. Even if you are lucky enough to find a partner who is as committed to your well-being as you are to hers, no one person maintains perfect equilibrium all the time, and no two people glide smoothly along through a life consisting exclusively of tenderness, lust, and contentment. To begin with, you must contend with whatever issues, external as well as internal, you and your partner brought into your relationship when you met. These are all but unlimited in number and variety, although they often take broadly recognizable forms: health problems, financial worries, unhelpful habits formed in earlier relationships, the inward toll of how a culture treats its different individuals, and the aftermath of past emotional trauma. In some cases, that trauma can render the very idea of love suspect. For those who have experienced love chiefly as withdrawal or cruelty, who have had it wielded against them by parents or partners or others and were made to suffer in its name, it can be difficult to believe in a version that is tender and generous, let alone find it and sustain it. A regrettable truth about our species is that our capacity to love is matched only by our ability to harm and hinder that capacity, and one measure of how fortunate you are with respect to fate, family, and society is how much you have been left free to find happiness with another person.