THAT'S MEN: The meaningful experiences in our life are bittersweet - filled with irritations and pleasures, writes Padraig O'Morain
MADAME DE Maintenon the mistress, possibly wife, of Louis XIV, was said to be unusual in her day because she was fond of children. Among the better classes, it seems, children were not much liked - parents preferred their pets.
Today, Madame de Maintenon would be quite put out by the increasing prominence given to research which supports the unfavourable attitude of her contemporaries.
I have mentioned this research before - it suggests that the happiness levels of couples falls when their first child is born and only recovers when the last child leaves home.
I suspect that to take this research as the last word, though, is to misunderstand the nature of happiness. More of that later.
To the proud father, congratulated by colleagues on the birth of a child, the research may make little sense. He feels a sense of euphoria about the new child who he feels adds meaning to his life and will change it for the better.
Then he reads that if you check people's happiness levels while they are with their children, you find that these levels are not as high as he might have expected. Yet the same people would say their children are a source of joy in their lives.
That's according to Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University who has written on this issue in Atlantic Monthly.
And he's not alone. The research has been around for some years. It hasn't been getting a great deal of attention, probably because the belief that children make you happy is so strongly embedded in our culture - it helps to keep the species going.
One conclusion you can draw from all this is that you would be better off without children. Indeed, Boston Globe columnist Penelope Trunk has concluded just that, advising female readers of her Brazen Careerist blog to maximise their happiness by not having kids, keeping their careers and, if they are divorced, getting plastic surgery.
I said above that this is to misunderstand the nature of happiness.
Deep happiness, I would suggest, does not involve feeling good all the time. That new father I mentioned at the start may say, without a word of a lie, that his baby brings a deep happiness into his life. But he is unlikely to feel happy about walking up and down the room with the baby at three in the morning in the hope that she will stop crying.
Later, when she is a teenager and she is fighting with her parents over where she can go and with whom and for how long, he is unlikely to feel a great sense of happiness either.
Yet he will almost certainly feel that she helps give meaning to his life. "Meaning" in this context I take to describe the experiences that make life worth living.
The meaningful experiences in our life are bittersweet. Your work may help give your life meaning but few of us go through a working day in a state of euphoria - the day has its successes and its failures, its irritations and its pleasures.
It's the same with children. Dr Russ Harris, an Australia-based therapist and author of The Happiness Trap, suggests in a recent newsletter that we have redefined happiness in ways that pose problems for us.
Throughout most of human history, he suggests, happiness has been seen as consisting in living a meaningful life consistent with your values. In the past 50 years, though, happiness has been redefined as "feeling good".
At lectures he suggests that children bring joy to parents but he also asks parents in the audience to say what else they bring. The list includes fear, anger, frustration and boredom.
So the experiences that bring meaning and joy into life also bring frustration, anger and other unpleasant emotions.
And that's why our new father is right to believe his new baby will bring meaning and joy into his life. All he has to do is to accept that meaning and joy don't come alone - they come with frustration, worry and other associates.
Once he accepts that, he is on the road to a real happiness rather than the fake version.
• Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor. His book That's Men - the best of the That's Men column from The Irish Timesis published by Veritas