The Happiness Of Men

May 19, 2009 / 9:44 am • By Dr. Melissa Clouthier

I’m amusing myself with headlines today. On the one hand, old, white Republican males are happy. On the other hand, young, white, blue-collar (read Republican?) males are being hammered by this recession/depression.

So, if the life arc of a white male is pondered, it looks like this: There’s the angry, young man phase. There’s the in-and-out of employment misery phase. And then there’s the happy, old guy phase. Right up until the die-before-woman phase.

Meanwhile, a woman’s misery happiness remains relatively constant.

Would you say that fits?

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  • mer

    Woman’s happiness is constant because happiness is an emotion, not a fact. Men deal in facts, not emotion. The old white guy being happy is based on the fact that he dies before woman.

    :)
    Just kidding.

  • http://mkfreeberg.webloggin.com Morgan K Freeberg

    I just happened to be blogging this morning about Thing I Know #157 which covers this nicely.

    It’s impossible for a man to be happy when his woman is unhappy, and it’s impossible for a woman to be unhappy when her man is happy. (If either of those is found not to be true, it means the man and woman aren’t really together.)

    So if a woman wants to be ecstatically happy, all she has to do is make sure her man is happy and the rest will follow…which I suspect is a surprise to many. If a man wants to keep himself from being unhappy, he should spend his efforts keeping his lady from being unhappy. But that last one is much more well-known across the eons, continents and languages.

    A man being unhappy when his woman is happy? Eminently possible. Commonplace, in fact.

  • http://www.enlightenedredneck.com Danny Glover

    I’m no longer an angry, young man (well, I’m not young), currently in the “in-and-out of employment misery phase,” and very much looking forward to being a happy, old guy like my father. So yeah, that sounds about right to me.