Consistency and Happiness

I have worked with several hundred people who were in a relationship with each other: husbands and wives, people about to get married, partnerships facing a tense situation, friendships that were turning acerb and a lot more people facing similar situations.

They all had a few things common, one of which is lack of consistency coming from one of the partners. Let me explain.

I am not talking about absence of hard work or giving up an effort when success is just near, I mean consistency in emotional patterns.

It is in our very nature to see consistent patterns.  We may hear people bragging about their moods and how moody they are, but do not we all have difficulty in getting along with them?

The corporate sector business organizations announce their dividends keeping in mind the same customer psychology: do not over-please your customers and deliver consistent financial results. If for a given year, the profits are unusually high, they do not change the dividends announced to the same extent. As compared to the previous figures, they only increase profits to a certain proportion. If they have unusual losses, they have reserves to handle those and let their share holders not see major negative shift in their share holdings.

We do not want to work with a colleague or a vendor, which offers work quality varied to a range from very best to disappointing. We want results on which we can rely.

Every relationship has two aspects: the toil and the fruit, the responsibility and the joy, the hard work and the fun. People fail relationships because they want to have the fruit without going through the toil.

Lack of emotional consistency on the part of one partner in a relationship is a major reason for lack of happiness and joy that was to come as a natural outcome of that relationship. Left over is then only the pain of responsibility but no joy.

I have heard the victims of such a relationship complaining: “I do not know when she would get upset on anything. It does not have to have a minimal thresh hold. It can be anything.” Or also: “Hassan, I have never been able to figure out how can I please this man? Some thing that I did a few days back and he was all excited and happy about that and now for the same act, he is pissed off”. And read this: “I love him, he tells me he loves me too, but I do not get the joy because I feel I am standing at a cliff and can fall any time. I feel a continuous threat of anything going wrong, which I may not even understand, which shall be followed by an evening of debate and mental hassle.”

We have to work on our emotional patterns too. We have to learn that we have to send our emotions to a disciplining school. We have to tell ourselves to add consistency in our patterns.

Though happiness does not lie in consistency intrinsically, but lack of consistency causes fear, which is definitely a huge threat of our mental and emotional state called happiness.

Its lack threats happiness.

Decide to act with a certain emotional consistency.

Decide to send that undisciplined kid inside of us to an emotional school.

Decide to add genuine happiness in your relationship.

There is no other way.