"The right person will fix it"

This one is quieter, because most people don't say it out loud. But it's there, on the bad days, in a relationship that's fine. The thought that with a different person, or with a person at all, the hum would go. That the flatness is a fact about who you come home to.

The marriage study from chapter 7 is the place to start, and this time look at the individual differences rather than the average. Lucas, Clark, Georgellis and Diener found that on average people rose at marriage and adapted back. But the average was made of very different lives. People who reacted strongly at the start were, years later, still far above where they'd been. Others showed trajectories going the opposite way, down through the marriage rather than up. The authors' conclusion was that marriage can be associated with long-lasting changes in satisfaction, in both directions, and that you'd miss this entirely if you only looked at the average.

So the person can matter. The finding isn't that partners don't change anything. It's that a partner isn't a next thing in the sense the rest of this book means, a purchase that lifts you for a season. What a relationship does to the level over years depends on what happens in it, and that's slow and cumulative, and it's the only kind of change in this research that runs both ways.

Lucas's later study of divorce, in the same German panel over eighteen years, adds the uncomfortable half. Satisfaction fell in the years before a divorce and recovered afterwards, but not completely. And people who would go on to divorce were already less satisfied than those who'd stay married, before either group had married at all. Some of what looks like the relationship's effect on a person was the person, carried in.

Put that beside the hum. If you're carrying a level into a relationship, the relationship will have it in it, and the next relationship will too. That's not a reason to stay in one that's bad. It's a reason to ask, honestly, which you're looking at. A relationship with a cause in it, unkindness, contempt, one row with different costumes that never gets resolved, is a thing to change, and an earlier book in this series, The same argument again, is about the last of those. A relationship that's ordinary, in which the hum is present the way it's present at work and in the flat, is not going to be fixed by its replacement. The person who'd fix it is not out there, because the hum isn't about a person.

I'd add one thing that's my own view. Of all the next things, this is the one where the season does the most damage, because a new relationship's season is intense enough to feel like proof, and its wearing off is the moment people decide they chose wrong. If you've done that twice, look at the year-later column before you do it a third time.