Overall, couples with more marital stress have worse immune function and higher blood pressure and heart rates, according to Debra Umberson, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas, who studies couples and stress.

So I’m ready to accept that, not really a big surprise, but the next question is,what makes good arguing? Is there such a thing. The piece goes on to explain, interestingly enough, how to argue well:

Let’s say, for example, your house is messy. You have a choice: you could say something like "This house such a mess, and you never help me clean it up" or you could say "I want us to learn how to be neater." The latter, marriage experts say, is better not just for your marriage but for your and your partner’s physical health.

"Any elements of criticism or demand make your words stressful," Umberson says.

Oh-oh. I want to say “good luck with that,” with a touch of cynicism. I don’t think anybody I know is going to be fooled by the so-called good example.

And then there’s this wisdom, which fits better with my world and my life (note: that’s life, with an l at the beginning; nothing that rhymes with it).

Your spouse is annoying. Accept it.

And I just plain love this interpretation. I can live with this. In fact, I think my wife and I have, for more than 40 years now, lived with several variations of this:

Umberson noticed something interesting in her studies of happy couples.

"It’s always been striking to me that when people get along, they just accept something annoying about their partner. They don’t try to alter it," she says.

Case in point: The wife in one of her happy couples had the habit of stacking up books in various places around the house, including doorways. Her husband wasn’t thrilled with it, but he learned to live with it — and more.

"He saw her as a creative, interesting, quirky person," she says. "He just saw it as a reflection of why he’d fallen in love with her in the first place."

There’s a lot of wisdom in that suggestion.

And there’s more in that same story. Don’t yell at a yeller. Limit the Greek chorus. Remember the good times. I’m impressed.

Samuel Johnson said happiness was anticipation, more than realization. Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning indicated it was being needed by loved ones, helping loved ones. Towards the end of this talk, she puts up an interesting set of slides about quantum change in values.

And what does Sheryl Crow say, in Soak up the Sun? It’s:

It’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.

You can click here for the actual TED site.

Happiness seems really important to me. I guess I’d have to say I think I know it when I see it, but I wouldn’t want to have to define it.

This is an interesting talk.

In case you don’t see the video, you can click here for the KVAL source page.

I got to thinking about it when a commenter on a previous post said that most people would love to write because there’s some kind of natural pull towards writing. I was also intrigued when I saw that established and well known bloggers Holly Hoffman and Jamie Harrop both started up brand new blogs last week, with subjects close to their hearts.

“Why?” He asks. Because what they were doing, the blogs they’d built, helped them discover their real voices. But they weren’t their real voices.

That’s a lot of what this blog is about. Chris continues…

Think about it for a moment. What are you speaking with before you find your voice? What are you saying and what message are you delivering? And just who are you being before you find your voice?

Before that happens your writing will be more constructed, abstracted, intellectualized. It’ll probably feel more of a struggle to get the words onto the page for the simple reason that you’re missing something fundamental.

You.

Both Holly and Jamie mentioned this very thing when explaining their need to start a new blog – that they needed to write about what they really wanted to write about, and to get a better fit by moving away from the constraints of their previous blog.

My main blogging is about business. I work to build traffic. This blog is for me. I work to put words, sentences, paragraphs, and, occasionally, poems or stories, together.