You Can’t Make Everyone Happy, and It’s Ok

Raise your hand if you ever find yourself trying to “make everyone happy.”

Yeah, I thought so. Me too. And while this tendency can, I am sure, strike men, anecdotally it seems more prevalent among women. It also might be probable possible that mothers tend to pass this curse inclination on to their daughters. I’m just sayin’.

Putting others’ needs first is a good thing; that mind- and heart-set is biblical. But where does the Bible say we are to make everyone else happy—all at the same time and all the time—by meeting all their wants?

Yet we try, don’t we? And we can feel terrible about ourselves when even one person inevitably is not grinning ear to ear in heavenly appreciation. We can also feel as though we have failed when we don’t try, because not trying feels like accepting failure. Even the few times we seem to manage to create a 360-degree world of happiness, we end up feeling defeated if we can’t replicate that home run on the next occasion or if the all-around happiness doesn’t last into the following day.

This seems to be the case especially with holidays. Beloved traditions help; we have a platform of sorts for success. But from year to year, one or more of our traditions can flop because someone had the gall to change their wants without telling us.

Most blog posts and articles I’ve read about this tendency say the problem, especially in its extreme, is about people-pleasing—a desire for everyone to like/love us, even if it means putting our own needs aside. In other words, sacrifice that can rise up to a “You look kind of blue; do you need some oxygen and an IV?” level. I don’t dispute that theory, but I think there is more to it.

Women often really, truly, genuinely want our people to be happy. Special occasions can be the worst. We plan a summer vacation we think everyone will adore so thoroughly that upon their return they will write songs about it and video themselves singing on YouTube. Or a four-day Thanksgiving bash weekend that will make the Christmas angels sing early, though not as early as Yuletide decorations appear in Walmart. (If either of these things have happened for you, please let me know how you managed it.)

Or maybe we simply try every hour, every day, every week, every year to get there—at home, at church, at our kids’ school, at work—and we’re too often out of steam from the constant effort of trying to make people happy because we want them to be . . . for them.

At this point, having had our share of the self-induced need for oxygen and IVs, my daughter and I have a saying: “We can’t make everyone happy.” And you know what? It mostly works for us. Our goal now is more often to avoid making any one person extremely unhappy, rather than trying to make our environments the emotional equivalent of Walt Disney World, A.K.A. The Happiest Place on Earth.

The bottom line: God is probably saying to those of us thus afflicted with the people-pleasing gene, “Can you please just relax?” Yes, He does know how happy the person who wrote about that Proverbs 31 woman sounded. But He also knows that pretty much never in the Bible does it say, “Thou shalt make everyone around you happy campers no matter what.”

Are you battling an urge to make everyone happy, especially as the holidays approach, because you genuinely want your people to be happy? Take heart. You can love and you can give a great deal—and most of the time everyone will be happy, or at least content—without killing yourself. You don’t have to ensure everyone around you is ecstatic all the time while you are practically on life support as a result.

The people in your life don’t need you to make a room sparkle and pulse magically by meeting all their wants all the time. [Tweet “What your people need to be happy is this: for you to be you and for you to be there.”]

Jean Kavich Bloom is a champion coffee drinker and mostly productive, pink-bathrobed freelance editor and writer. She does not garden, bake, or knit but says playing Scrabble is exactly the same thing. Jean and her husband, Cal, live in Indiana. They have three children (plus two who married in) and five grandchildren. You can read her blog at bloominwordstoo.blogspot.com.

Photograph by, Lisa Runnels.