“You’ve heard that line about all happy families being the same?”
“War and Peace”, I said.
“Anna Karenina, but that’s not the point. The point is, it’s untrue. No family, happy or unhappy, is quite like any other.”
I read this in The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn recently. I use the Anna Karenina principle quite a bit in many contexts and discussions. In fact, recently, while reading Guns, Germs & Steel, I realised he had used this framing too. To put it simply, there are x number of conditions that definitely need to be met for something to succeed. The ‘something’ could be anything from origin of life to economical supremacy, and the ‘x’ conditions would change with that context. But in a given context, only those who fulfill all the x conditions will succeed.
Naturally, as a believer, I was miffed by Finn’s (character’s) statement. But, could he be right?
As I write this, D and I are a day away from celebrating 21 years of being together, 15 of them in a married state. Speaking of state, Kerala in the late 90s and early noughties, much like other non-metros in India, wasn’t friendly to intimacy or dating. In fact, the reaction to our relationship was actually a combination of the two – intimidating! Especially since a couple of religions were involved. Anyhow, here we are, 21 years later – happy.
The stage was set for a thought experiment. Are we happy in the same way other couples are? I’d think not. I don’t really have data, so I will use a simple non social-media-posturing observation. There are a lot of happy families with kids.* We chose not to succumb to that genetic pressure. So we’re different from other happy families. Does that mean Finn is right, and Tolstoy was wrong?
I think it just isn’t as binary as that. Tolstoy was right because if one figured out the conditions that need to be met for a happy marriage, I have a feeling the successful couples would be meeting them (children most likely will not feature in that list). Finn is right too, because the way in which the couples met them would be drastically different from each other.
In any case, I don’t think we have found an objective framing of happiness to begin with!
*There is interesting data (Google searches and experiments) to show how “kids bring happiness” is just belief transmission for evolution’s needs and not the truth it is portrayed to be. But people have their own narratives of what happiness is, so I’ll leave it at that.
