Ever say “I’ll be happy when …?” Here’s why you need to stop doing that — now.
It was the summer of 2017, and I was sitting around a campfire with my college girlfriend and some of her friends.
She was a year younger than me and headed back to school in the fall; I was moving to Washington DC, for my first job. Even though we were spinning off in different directions, we weren’t quite ready for it to end. On a whim I said, “Let’s go to Iceland!”
“Iceland?” she said, looking at me strangely.
“Yeah! It’s beautiful there, and I want to see the Northern Lights.”
I can’t remember her exact reply, but it was not enthusiastic. We broke up two months later.
Iceland was a symbol of a lot of things for me. It was an indicator of compatibility, but it was also a thing I believed I needed to do with a partner. And finding a partner was the one thing that I truly felt I needed in order to be happy in life.
This habit of saying “I’ll be happy when …” is far more insidious than it seems on the surface.
In fact, whenever anything good happened to me, I thought, “Sure, this is nice, but I’ll be happy when I find a partner.”
