The Hard

Laura A. King
Road to the Good Life

THE HARD ROAD TO THE GOOD LIFE:

THE HAPPY, MATURE PERSON

LAURA A. KING is currently an associate profes-

sor of psychology at Southern Methodist Univer-
sity, having received her Ph.D. in personality psy-
chology from the University of California, Davis
in 1991. She received her A.B. in English litera-
ture and psychology at Kenyon College in Ohio.
Her research interests include goals and how our
daily goals affect our thoughts, mood, behavior,
and well-being, and linking these daily goals to loftier ends, including peo-
ple’s life dreams and worst fears. In addition, she has done research on folk
concepts of the good life, narrative approaches to life transitions, and emo-
tional expression and health. In general, her work reflects an enduring
interest in what is good and healthy in people. Having served as an associ-
ate editor for Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Laura is cur-
rently an associate editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psy-
chology (the Personality and Individual Differences section).

Summary

The purpose of this article is to examine how two aspects of the good
life, happiness and maturity, are reflected in the stories that people
tell about their lives. This article highlights the ways that ego devel-
opment may change the meaning and experience of happiness.
When happy people tell stories of life transition, they are more likely
to use foreshadowing and happy endings. When mature people tell
such stories, they tend to include mention of their active struggle
with their life changes. The stories of happy, mature individuals are
examined to illustrate how negative life experiences and difficult
times may be accommodated into the good life.

You have ups and downs in life. You have storms to contend with. I just
thank the Lord for all of his goodness and mercy.
—Emma Hughes, on her 108th
birthday

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The preparation of this article and the research reported in it
were supported by NIMH/FIRST Award No. 54142.
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 41 No. 1, Winter 2001 51-72
© 2001 Sage Publications, Inc. 51
52 The Hard Road to the Good Life

When social and personality psychologists discuss positive

human functioning, very often they are talking about how gener-
ally happy a person is. This emphasis on happiness has drawn crit-
icism, suggesting that it has limited psychology’s appreciation and
understanding of the multiple facets of the good life (Ryff & Singer,
1998). Although it is probably not the case that even individuals
who focus primarily on happiness view it as the definitive aspect of
the good life, it is clear that happiness, positive emotion, and life sat-
isfaction are all typical outcome measures in many studies of
well-being.
Several features of happiness render it a seductive component of
the good life for research purposes. First, the plain truth seems to
be that people do want to be happy. Research on values, goals, and
wishes has shown repeatedly that happiness is a common desire, at
least among Western samples (Baumeister, 1987; King & Broyles,
1997; Richards, 1966; Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987). In our work on the
folk concepts of the good life, we have found that happiness is a
strong predictor of the judged desirability, value, and moral good-
ness of a life (King & Napa, 1998). The popularity of books aimed at
increasing happiness certainly attests to the generalizability of
these findings.
Second, there are theoretical grounds for focusing on happiness.
Enjoyment is clearly a part of many of the constructs thought to be
important to optimal functioning. For example, the experience of
flow (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) includes positive emotion. One
way to measure intrinsic motivation is to measure task enjoyment.
Thus, it makes sense that an optimal life might include many
happy experiences.
Finally, happiness appears to be fairly easy to measure (with
some consideration to defensiveness, cf. Shedler, Mayman, & Manus,
1993). It may well be that a very good way to measure happiness is
to simply ask people how happy they are (cf. Larsen & Fredrickson,
2000). Thus, compared with other common features of the good life
(e.g., a sense of purpose, wisdom, creativity, a philosophy of life,
accomplishments) (Allport, 1961; Becker, 1992; Rogers, 1961; Rus-
sell, 1930/1958; Ryff, 1989), happiness is a ready candidate for re-
search (not that these other aspects of the good life haven’t inspired
research—but clearly not as much as happiness). It is somewhat
understandable that in studies of human functioning, outcome
measures have tended to focus on feelings of positive emotion—
 Laura A. King 53

happiness, satisfaction, and so forth. These features of happiness

have been well exploited by researchers, and fully exploring the
nuances of positive emotional experience in human life remains a
fascinating and worthwhile endeavor (cf. Kahneman, Diener, &
Schwarz, 2000).
My purpose in this article is not to argue against the importance
of emotional well-being to the good life. Rather, I hope to point out
an important ambiguity in the world of happiness. The question of
much research on subjective well-being has tended to be, How can
we live happier lives? or What variables relate to a happier life? My
tentative answer is another question, How happy should the well-
functioning person be? Furthermore, how much do we really know
about a person, knowing how happy he or she is?
Although clearly specific, positive emotional experiences have
been, and to some extent continue to be, neglected in social and per-
sonality research (cf. Fredrickson, 1998), it is also worth noting
that much research on well-being has failed to look beyond positive
emotional experience as definitive of a satisfying life. Focusing on
positive emotional experience in defining the good life has a num-
ber of potential problems. First, focusing on positive emotion as the
essential feature of a good life tends to address other aspects of the
good life as they relate or lead to happiness, rather than as out-
comes in their own right. For example, research on another impor-
tant feature of a good life, a sense of purpose and meaning, has
tended to focus on how a sense of meaning in life relates to life sat-
isfaction or emotional well-being (e.g., Antonovsky, 1988; Zika &
Chamberlain, 1992). Another pitfall of focusing on positive emo-
tional experience as definitive of the good life is the tendency to
view any negative emotion as problematic. Thus, the experience of
distress, regret, and disappointment are often viewed as negative
experiences, certainly to be avoided. How realistic is it to expect
that adults will weather all of life’s storms with nary a regret? Is
the optimally functioning person incapable of disappointment,
regret, or apology? (Or gaining from such experiences?) Surely not.
Yet, the focus on the maximization of positive affect and the mini-
mization of negative affect has led to a view of the happy person as
a well-defended fortress, invulnerable to the vicissitudes of life.
Clearly, with the current research focusing on mood management
and affect regulation, there is, at least to a degree, a lack of atten-
tion to the emotional richness that is likely to be found in a well-
54 The Hard Road to the Good Life

lived life. Perhaps focusing so much on subjective well-being, we

have missed the somewhat more ambivalent truth of the good life,
that good lives, lives well worth living, include suffering, bitter-
sweet experiences, and even regret.
In this article, I hope to demonstrate the utility of considering
happiness as only one among a number of outcomes that might have
value. One outcome variable that appears, at least empirically, to
be independent of happiness is maturity (cf. Noam, 1998; Vaillant &
McCullough, 1987). Throughout this article, I will be describing
the relatively more mature person as one who takes a more differ-
entiated and integrated view of the world, one who possesses a rel-
atively more complex self. I will be using Loevinger’s (1976) concep-
tion of ego development (ED) as a means to incorporate maturity
into a consideration of the good life. Loevinger viewed ED as a
“master trait” that would have enormous impact on all other
aspects of the person’s life. Thus, we can ask not only how happy a
person is but also what kind of happiness does this person enjoy. I
will suggest that hard-earned maturity can change the meaning
and experience of happiness. In my research, I have relied on the
stories that individuals tell about their life experiences as a way to
examine the manifestations of happiness and emerging maturity.
A conclusion that has been reached in my research program over
the past few years is that happiness and maturity may follow two
different and independent pathways. We have found this pattern of
results in a variety of individuals—including parents of children
with Down’s syndrome (DS), gay men and lesbians, and women
who have experienced divorce after more than 20 years of mar-
riage. We have found that it is likely that individuals will find hap-
piness even after potentially traumatic life events. It is also possi-
ble for these individuals to develop through these experiences—to
deepen in their self-understanding, to come to a broader perception
of the world. However, these two outcomes appear to have little to
do with each other. In examining the stories that these groups of
individuals have to tell about their experiences, narrative vari-
ables that relate to happiness are unrelated to personality devel-
opment. In addition, variables related to personal growth or per-
sonality development tend to be independent of levels of happiness.
In this article, I will review some of that research, highlighting the
ways that happiness and maturity are reflected in the stories peo-
 Laura A. King 55

ple tell. Finally, I will suggest that these two largely independent
phenomena—satisfaction and maturity—are two of the goods of
life, the co-occurrence of which we might wish to explore further.
Before looking at the stories of mature happy people, it may be help-
ful to review some ideas about maturity and narrative approaches
to empirical research in this area.

PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT,
MATURITY, AND HAPPINESS

In his classic book Pattern and Growth in Personality, Gordon

Allport (1961) laid the groundwork for a positive personality psy-
chology. Allport’s characteristics of the healthy mature person are
worth revisiting as they bring a commonsense approach to the
rather abstract construct of the good life. According to Allport, the
healthy mature person possesses the capacity for self-extension.
Allport described the healthy mature person as having a positive
but objective and realistic self-view, capacity for intimate relation-
ships, common sense, a sense of humor, and a unifying philosophy
of life. He eloquently contrasted the mature person from the cynic
through “the conviction that at bottom something is more impor-
tant than laughter, namely the fact that he, the laugher, and the
laughter, itself, have a place in the scheme of things” (p. 301).
Thus, in describing the mature person, Allport (1961) recog-
nized that one of the key challenges of maturity is to invest daily
life with meaning—to find or create opportunities to make our lives
matter. Cantor and Sanderson (2000) suggest that engagement in
life throughout the life span is a crucial aspect of well-being. For
Allport, the mature person occupied a world of meaning—placing
himself or herself in the larger scheme of life. In my work, I have
examined this world of meaning via the stories that individuals
tell about their life experiences, their life plans, and their lost or
forsaken opportunities.
It notable that in Allport’s (1961) description of the mature per-
son, happiness is given relatively little attention. The overall con-
tentment of the mature person is perhaps conveyed in their posi-
tive self-view and capacity for humor, but overall happiness was
not included as a definitive feature of maturity. To study maturity,
56 The Hard Road to the Good Life

therefore, it would seem desirable to find an approach that doesn’t

confound maturity with happiness. Many conceptions of develop-
ment seem to imply that the more developed a person is, the hap-
pier he or she will be (e.g., Erikson, 1963). An alternative view is
provided by Loevinger’s (1976) approach to ED.
Loevinger (1976; Hy & Loevinger, 1996) presented ED as the
level of complexity with which the person is able to conceive of him-
self or herself and his or her world. According to Loevinger’s theory,
at the earliest stages of ED, we are dominated by impulses, lack
insight, and engage in simplistic thinking. As we mature psycho-
logically, we come to experience ourselves and the world in more
complex ways. We come to control and channel impulses. We recog-
nize that every problem may have a variety of valid answers. As we
mature, we increasingly recognize conflict in the world and in our-
selves. The more mature individual is capable of experiencing a
degree of ambivalence that escapes the less mature person. As
mentioned previously, ED has generally not been found to relate to
measures of positive emotional functioning or adjustment (cf.
Noam, 1998; Vaillant & McCullough, 1987). This is important
because it allows us to examine happiness and maturity as distinct
phenomena.
A caveat may be appropriate here. This discussion of maturity
and adjustment is not “sadder but wiser redux” (cf. Alloy &
Abramson, 1979). Happy people are not mindless people. Happi-
ness and ED are independent, and thus, any possible combination
of these variables may be found in a person. At Loevinger’s (1976)
highest levels of ED, the individual is occupied with the issues of
individuality and identity, indicating the possibility of resolution,
transcendence, and fulfillment. Thus, maturity and happiness
need not be seen as having an adversarial relationship. Rather, it
may be best to think of happiness as a different kind of accomplish-
ment at different levels of maturity. When life is easy, so is happi-
ness. When life is difficult, finding a way to be happy may be a greater
challenge. Furthermore, being happy may be viewed as only one of
the possible valuable outcomes of having difficult life experiences.

The Hard Work of Maturation

Loevinger (1976) noted that only when the environment fails to

conform to the person’s expectations is there potential for growth.
She referred to “pacers” as complex interpersonal situations that
 Laura A. King 57

might pull an individual to a higher level of ego functioning. When

we are faced with difficult life circumstances, we have the opportu-
nity to develop the complexity of our perspectives. In support of this
assertion, Helson and her colleagues (e.g., Helson, 1992; Helson &
Roberts, 1994; Helson & Wink, 1987) have demonstrated that life
experiences may relate to enhanced ED. Women who had a higher
degree of “life stimulation” tended to show a greater degree of ED
over 31 years. Similarly, Bursik (1991) found that women who had
gone through divorce but successfully coped experienced an
increase in ED. Baumeister, Shapiro, and Tice (1985) found that
individuals who had experienced an identity crisis were actually
better off in terms of academic achievement, achievement motiva-
tion, and interpersonal intimacy than those who had experienced
no crisis. Difficult life circumstances may be seen as opportunities
to grow.
This discussion also resonates with the work on wisdom of Baltes
and his colleagues (e.g., Baltes, Staudinger, Maercker, & Smith,
1995). Baltes and Staudinger (1993) defined wisdom as expert
knowledge—“the fundamental pragmatics of life permitting ex-
ceptional insight, judgment, and advice involving complex and
uncertain matters of the human condition” (p. 76). Wise thinking is
characterized by relativism, uncertainty, and contextualism. More
important, wisdom is enhanced by life experiences that involve
dealing with difficult and unstructured matters of life, or “wisdom
facilitative experiences” (Baltes et al., 1995). Although there are
certainly differences between Loevinger’s (1976) approach to ED and
Baltes’s conceptualization of wisdom, both of these perspectives
indicate that life experience can propel personality development—
but this experience involves confronting difficult and ambiguous
life circumstances.
Jack Block (1982) described the processes by which personality
develops using the Piagetian concepts of assimilation and accom-
modation. In assimilation, the individual avoids any meaningful
change of orientation and manages to simply fit a new experience
into his or her existing framework. When assimilation fails, the per-
son may “construct or invent new schemes that are equilibrating”
(Block, 1982, p. 291). Assumptions are tested. Frameworks are
revised and rewritten. Clearly, accommodation may be a difficult
process. It may be a process that precludes, at least temporarily,
happiness, or it may be a process that changes the meaning of
happiness.
58 The Hard Road to the Good Life

STORIES AND MATTERING

Human beings are habitual meaning makers (Erikson, 1963).

The need to make sense—to find meaning and coherence in life
events—is arguably a central human need (cf. Frankl, 1985;
Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Janoff-Bulman & Berg, 1998). In the face of
major life change, human beings are prone to spontaneously gener-
ate stories about what happened (e.g., Pennebaker, 1989). Stories
represent a distillation of the experience, a unit meaning that the
individual has created. The narrative approach to studying per-
sonality and social psychology has recently found supporters from
a variety of perspectives (e.g., Barresi & Juckes, 1997; Baumeister &
Newman, 1994; McAdams, 1993, 1996). Stories about important
life events—high points, low points, transitions—may be consid-
ered to be the building blocks of the life story (McAdams, 1993) and
identity (Lieblich & Josselson, 1997; Singer, 1995; Singer & Salovey,
1993).
An important component of the good life is making one’s daily
life meaningful and being actively engaged in one’s life (Cantor &
Sanderson, 2000). Desires, intentions, and yearnings are inter-
twined with the coherent stories that make up human lives. Two
ways that humans construct meaning include commitment to a set
of important goals and “the use of stories to place life in a genuinely
ultimate context” (Baird, 1985, p. 117). McAdams (1992) stated,
“There can be no story without intention. Further, there can be no
intention without story ” (p. 330). Investing in our lives through
goals is an act of hope and a creation of a fictive future.
As data, stories allow for a triangulation of methods, both quan-
titative and qualitative. Stories allow us to examine the content
dimensions that are most likely to be associated with aspects of the
good life, including happiness and meaning. They also allow us to
go back and test our empirical findings against the single case, to
place our findings in the rich context of autobiography, of life story.

What Kinds of Stories Do Happy People Tell?

In a recent study (King, Scollon, Ramsey, & Williams, in press),

we asked a sample of parents of children with DS (N = 87) to write
the story of finding out that they would be parenting a child with
DS. The parents were asked to respond to the following instruc-
tions, “Please write about the moment when you first were told that
 Laura A. King 59

your child had DS. Be as detailed as possible. Write it like a story in

the space below and on the back of this page if necessary.” In addi-
tion to writing their stories, these parents completed measures of
happiness (Life Satisfaction: Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin,
1985; and Sense of Coherence: Antonovsky, 1988) and Loevinger’s
Sentence Completion Test (Hy & Loevinger, 1996) as a measure of
ED.
The stories were content analyzed in a variety of ways. Two
aspects of the stories were examined as correlates of happiness:
foreshadowing and happy endings. Foreshadowing in a story refers
to signs warning of forthcoming tragedy. Symbolically represent-
ing coming events is a way in which narrative coherence is
enhanced. Just as in a movie, the minor-key piano music might por-
tend a coming shark attack; in life, the strange feeling one had in
the morning becomes a portent of the car accident when the story of
the car accident is told. We found evidence of foreshadowing in 27%
of the stories. Foreshadowing included feeling that something was
wrong, having bad dreams, or seeing children with DS during one’s
pregnancy. A vivid example of foreshadowing includes the follow-
ing: “At our baby shower, we opened a box with a child care book.
My husband opened it at random and started reading loud. I
looked at him in horror as we both realized he was reading about
DS” (King et al., in press).
In addition, to foreshadowing, we examined the affective tone of
the stories’ endings. Interestingly, slightly less than half of the sto-
ries told by parents in our sample had happy endings. An example
of a happy ending includes the following:

I know my daughter is quite special. It’s as if she’s part of another

race or from another planet. She’s definitely wired differently. And I
think those wires are hooked directly to God. She’s the closest I’ve
come to an angel on Earth. (King et al., in press)

In contrast, an example of an unhappy ending includes, “I was de-

pressed. . . . When I told my mother, she fainted. My other child be-
came so upset due to the circumstances that she vomited. It was
simply devastating.”
Results showed that happiness was strongly associated with
both foreshadowing and happy endings. Thus, happy people tell
stories that are high in coherence and that feature happy endings.
Because these results are correlational, it is impossible to know
whether happiness promoted the telling of more coherent and posi-
60 The Hard Road to the Good Life

tive stories or whether these stories served as a form of inspiration

to the parents. One way to think of these happy endings is as coping
via positive reframing—finding the good in something negative. A
provocative extension of our work using narratives involves exam-
ining whether we can coax people into telling a story with a happy
ending (King & Miner, 2000). We have found that asking individu-
als to find the positive, even in their most negative life events, is
associated with heightened physical health (King & Miner, 2000).

What Kinds of Stories Do Mature People Tell?

The use of foreshadowing and happy endings were unrelated to
measures of maturity in the parents of children with DS (King et al.,
in press)—story aspects related to happiness may not be relevant
to maturity. We were interested in developing a way to measure the
process of accommodation in transition stories. We designed a cod-
ing scheme for detecting manifestations of accommodative change
in transition stories. Table 1 shows the categories we have used to
code for accommodation in stories of life transitions. Essentially,
these categories are based on the idea that the degree to which an
individual has consciously struggled with a life problem is going to
be reflected in the story of that life experience. An example of a
story that scored high in accommodation follows:

I cried some and experienced waves of “unknown” embracing me. . . . I

knew little about DS—it was an abstraction. Any handicap fell into
the category of a childhood memory of seeing “waterheads,” as I was
told or remember, out on a shopping trip getting into a bus. My
daughter was flesh and blood and a good nurser, and that was the
reality I remember dealing with. I thought very little about her
future, but I knew I would bow to no predictions. Irrational thoughts
came to me at times but did not consume much thinking time: “I
must have DS too, it just hasn’t been discovered yet” or “This child
must be a consequence for wrong decisions in the past.”

It is notable that accommodation was unrelated to the overall emo-

tional tone of the story, to the occurrence of foreshadowing or happy
ending. In addition, the level of trauma expressed in the story was
not a good indicator of accommodation (King et al., in press). Thus,
in stories, accommodation is not so much reflected in the emotional
distress of the experience. Rather, accommodation tended to show
up in the admission that the experience was truly challenging to
one’s worldview, in mention of the cognitive work of searching that
 Laura A. King 61

TABLE 1: Content Categories for Accommodation Coding

Category Description

Paradigmatic shift This rating concerns the degree of change that en-
tails a paradigmatic shift for the person. The new
experience requires a revision of structures—an
actual change in response to the environment. A
qualitative change in how the person sees the
world and himself or herself. The person has been
forced to change, centrally and qualitatively, his or
her views of the self and the world.
Exploration This relates to how much has the person searched
and struggled with the change. This may include
commenting on his or her own coping processes.
Activity versus passivity Is the narrator primarily a passive recipient of expe-
rience or primarily taking an active part in what is
happening?

the individual felt compelled to do to make sense of the experience,

and in actively grappling with the experience. These narrative di-
mensions of accommodation were positively correlated with ED
and were unrelated to measures of happiness. Furthermore, in pre-
dicting ED over 2 years, Time 1 ED interacted with accommoda-
tion in the transition stories to predict ED. Specifically, for individ-
uals who were relatively low in ED, those who included
accommodative imagery in their stories were more likely to show
gains in development over time.
One way that a person can construct a happy ending for a nega-
tive life experience is by feeling that they have grown or matured
as a person because of the life event (e.g., Park, Cohen, & Murch,
1996). However, it is interesting to note that personal growth and
happiness may not always coincide—our measure of accommoda-
tion was essentially independent of self-reported measures of hav-
ing grown through the experience of parenting a child with DS.

ADULTHOOD AND THE ACKNOWLEDGMENT

OF LEGITIMATE LOSS AND SACRIFICE

Research on subjective well-being has demonstrated the robust

relationship between pursuing personally important goals and
well-being (Brunstein, 1993; Cantor & Sanderson, 2000; Emmons,
62 The Hard Road to the Good Life

1989, 1991; King, in press; Omodei & Wearing, 1990). Having highly
complex plans and goals for the future is also positively related to
personality development (McAdams, Ruetzel, & Foley, 1986). Yet,
investing in goals is a risky proposition. By investing energy in a
life pursuit, we may be setting ourselves up for disappointment if
the goal is unattainable. Goal pursuit is imbued not only with
potential rewards but also with potential regret.
Not surprisingly, research examining the role of regret in life
has tended to look at how regrets relate (negatively) to positive
emotional well-being. Ryff (1989) found that regrets were a predic-
tor of lowered psychological well-being in midlife. Lecci, Okun, and
Karoly (1994) found that regrets accounted for a significant por-
tion of the variance in well-being, controlling for current goal char-
acteristics. Aspects of regrets added to the prediction of (decreased)
life satisfaction and (increased) depression. This research cer-
tainly supports the idea that lost life goals might best be forgotten
so that the individual can move on and pursue other purposes—
supporting the conventional wisdom of not dwelling on “water under
the bridge” (for a contrasting view, see Stewart & Vandewater,
1999). Indeed, ruminating about loss has certainly been shown to
be predictive of poorer adjustment (Lyubomirsky & Nolen-
Hoeksema, 1993; Niedenthal, Tangney, & Gavanski, 1994). Thus,
we would predict that thoughts about lost life goals would be asso-
ciated with lowered happiness.
One way to imagine accommodation manifesting itself is in the
person’s capacity to look in a nondefensive way at “what might have
been.” We would expect the mature person to be able to place his or
her life story in a larger context of circumstances and choices that
have molded that narrative into its own unique form. Truly accom-
modating life experiences may require the clear-eyed admission of
loss, of the negative and positive aspects of life transformation.
We have examined how narrative descriptions of lost or forsaken
possible selves relate to happiness and ED (e.g., King & Patterson,
2000; King, Ramsey, Smith, & Bell, 2000). A recent study of gay
men and lesbians is particularly appropriate to this discussion. Gay
men and lesbians were an ideal sample for our purposes. Cass’s
(1979) stage model of gay identity development suggests that gay
individuals experience something very much like Loevinger’s
(1976) concept of ED as they move toward higher levels of develop-
ment. Although pride in gay identity is associated with a high level
of identity development, the highest level of gay identity involves
 Laura A. King 63

an appreciation for the positive and negatives of being a gay per-

son, and an acknowledgment of the positive aspects of heterosex-
ual life (Cass, 1979; Coleman, 1982). Developing gay identity has
been considered to be a strengthening experience requiring indi-
viduals to consciously consider the meaning of their sexuality and
to deliberately construct a meaningful life as a gay person
(D’Augelli, 1991, 1994). Thus, we were interested in asking these
identity experts to share with us their consideration of gay and
straight lives. There is no question that for these individuals, being
gay promises to bring them the greatest amount of happiness and
self-fulfillment (Luhtanen, 1996). Yet, coming out and living as a
gay person also has its costs. Being true to oneself can be difficult in
a society that oppresses gay people.
To examine the relations of straight and gay possible selves to
life satisfaction and ED, we asked gay men and lesbians (N = 107)
to write narrative descriptions of the best possible selves (King,
1998; Markus & Ruvolo, 1989) that they might have had if they
were heterosexual and to write about their current best possible
selves, given that they happen to be gay. In addition, these partici-
pants completed measures of life satisfaction and ED. Investment
in the possible selves was measured by having participants rate how
much they currently think about the possible self described and by
having judges rate the level of elaboration (vividness, detail) of the
possible-self descriptions.
Excerpts from highly elaborate straight possible selves follow.

As I was growing up, I envisioned my life to be like the lives of those I

admired. Those lives were something to aspire to. I grew up in a
small town. . . . My parents and their friends were involved in volun-
teer work, owned businesses, and were active in community politics.
My dream was to be a veterinarian. I imagined that I was married
(as that is what is supposed to happen). I dreamed that my wife
would be the manager of the pet store we both owned. . . . We would
be active in the community. Small towns can be so much fun. . . . I
would be well-known as someone who is a good person and down to
earth. . . . The business would be successful and eventually passed
down to our children.
Here I am a happy little straight woman: I’ve lived independently for
about 5 years after college, traveled my country and the greater part
of Europe. During these years I have scraped to get by, but that is
okay with me. I feel complete and whole as a strong, independent
woman. Nothing could be better until . . . I meet him. He is worldly,
strong, intelligent, and equipped with the best sense of humor of
anyone I’ve met. Of course, he is also extremely good-looking and
64 The Hard Road to the Good Life

loaded but not pretentious. We fall madly in love and live our lives as
rich gypsies, traveling the world until we find the perfect place to call
home and start a family. . . . Our kids grow up in a nurturing
nonjudgmental environment.

Results demonstrated that although investment in one’s gay best

possible self was a predictor of life satisfaction, level of investment in
one’s straight possible self—the goals that were no longer available—
was associated with lowered levels of life satisfaction. However, ED
was associated with the elaboration of the straight possible selves,
even controlling for elaboration of the gay possible-self narratives
(King et al., 2000). These results indicate that happiness and ma-
turity may be found down different pathways. Avoiding thinking
about loss may be one way to be happy, but it may also preclude the
kind of examination necessary for growth. Although investing in
the present and not looking back relates to heightened happiness,
how we look back on the selves we’ve lost or forsaken relates
strongly to personality development. Even a very positive life tran-
sition involves loss. A life without loss is a life without meaningful
investment.

THE HAPPY AND MATURE PERSON

As in other studies of ED and adjustment, we have found these

two variables to be largely unrelated in all of the samples we’ve
examined (r’s range from .08 to .13, n.s.). It is worth noting that
such a lack of relationship indicates that we might expect all possi-
ble combinations of happiness and maturity to be found in our
samples. Thus, happy, mature individuals do indeed exist. An
informal consideration of the happiest and most mature partici-
pants in our samples provides an interesting view of the happy and
mature person (King, Smith, Patterson, & Ruff, 2000). To examine
these stories, I selected individuals in the highest levels of ED in
three samples, the parents of children with DS, gay men and lesbi-
ans, and a sample of women who had experienced divorce after
approximately 20 years of marriage. Among these individuals, I
selected those who scored in the top third of life satisfaction. In
reading these stories, a variety of themes are present. I offer these
here as a beginning at identifying some of the features of happy and
mature individuals.
 Laura A. King 65

Allport (1961) noted that the healthy, mature person ought to

possess a realistic view of himself or herself and be able to look at
the self with a sense of humor (p. 296). In examining the stories of
happy, mature individuals, a level of self-deprecation is clear. These
individuals are often found looking back, with some affection, on a
more naive version of themselves. Examples from the sample of
parents of children with DS demonstrate this point.

It was long enough ago that the word was Mongoloid. I was alone,
and it was late at night when the doctor told me. Of course, my mind
clicked in to an offensive mode of denial—bad dream, etc. I chose not
to call my husband. . . . Instead—I laugh at this now because I was
33—I called my parents. I think I wanted them to fix things—they
had been pretty good at that in the past. . . . Then I realized that I
was mourning as if my child had died, yet I still had a nice fat baby in
the nursery. I rang for him to be brought to me expecting him to be a
monster instead of the cute thing I saw in the delivery room. I tore all
of his clothes off of him and just looked at him. He was beautiful.
The doctor recommended immediately institutionalizing him and
said it would be best if I never saw my son. . . . It took a day of being a
totally hysterical mother before they would let me see or hold my
son. The moment I held him, I knew he would stay with me.

The following examples come from women who had experienced di-
vorce after being married for more than 20 years:

I think I was raised to be a wife and mother. I thought if I followed all

the “rules,” we would live happily ever after. . . .
Living in a small town in a modest home, being a housewife in retire-
ment years—it was sort of like the television show Mayberry RFD. I
wanted to be “Aunt Bea,” but with a contented husband who let me
be myself—like “Andy.”

Finally, the following are drawn from the coming out stories of les-
bians in our gay and lesbian sample:

I did not really come out until I was 40 because I was a public school
teacher and it was important to me to fulfill my mission. When I was
40, I realized that I had dedicated myself to a job with the sacrifice of
my personhood. I came out very quickly then.
About the same time that I realized I was a lesbian, my Dad was
dying . . . so I went to the hospital and sat with him for the final 2
weeks of his life. There was a lot of time to think, and I realized he
never really knew me. Hell, even I really didn’t know me!
66 The Hard Road to the Good Life

These examples demonstrate the willingness of the happy, mature

person to admit to being naive and even foolhardy in one’s expecta-
tions of the world. Surely, these individuals convey a sense of being
wiser. At the same time, the lack of bitterness in their stories is
noteworthy. An example from a mother of a child with DS who scored
very high on ED but quite low on life satisfaction is notable in this
regard: “I was 37 years old and knew all the risks. But I foolishly
believed that nothing bad could ever happen to me” (King et al., in
press). The heightened perception of the mature individual can be
enormously painful without the resource of happiness.
Allport (1961) also noted that the mature person ought to be
able to take a realistic view of others. Excerpts from the coming out
stories of some of the women in our gay and lesbian sample demon-
strate this point well:

Shortly after leaving my husband, I met a woman 11 years older

than I whom I developed a “crush” on. . . . I remember the day after
we first made love thinking that I was now “gay.” It didn’t occur to me
that there was still a choice. I am not sure if I even wanted a
choice. . . . She told me that I was the first woman with whom she had
a relationship. This was a lie, but looking back, I think it helped me
to be more at ease believing that we were exploring sex, love, and life
together.

Mature happiness can be a difficult life accomplishment. The fol-

lowing excerpts from the coming out stories of lesbians illustrate
the struggle from which happy maturity can emerge:

The idea that I could be a homosexual just did not occur to me. The
summer after high school graduation, I worked at an all girls sum-
mer camp. I had a crush on another counselor (a girl my age). We
wrote love letters to each other the next fall through the spring (still
I hadn’t a clue); I even showed the letters to my mother. When she
visited (she lived in another town), she tried to kiss me. I freaked out
and left. I was quite depressed in 6 months, realizing that I was “a
homosexual,” knowing only bad/evil connotations of that word. I told
no one.
This is how I discovered my lesbian nature, but it is important part
of being homosexual that one must continue to come out over and
over. Every time I meet someone new, there is a possibility that I may
have to come out again. The presumed heterosexuality of this cul-
ture is a constant burden.
I contained many of my feelings and fears about being gay as I lis-
tened to immediate family members make rude comments about
 Laura A. King 67

[gay people]. I learned early on that I didn’t want to be talked about

like that. So I dated, had a terribly unhappy adolescence, and carried
a chip on my shoulder well into my adult life. Even though my first
gay experience was at 19, we were so extremely closeted [that] it
wasn’t funny. We were even afraid to hang around with other gay
people. I know we thought it was a fluke, that we were different than
those “gay” people, and we would go on to marry men and be normal.
The first person I ever came out to was my best friend. . . . I was cry-
ing because I didn’t want to [be] miserable the rest of my life. . . . Why
did this have to happen to me? Why couldn’t I fully love and receive
love from a man? I was bitter for a long time.

In reading the accounts of these happy, mature people, it is clear

that they perceive themselves as changing through their impor-
tant life transitions—as moving from being naive (but perhaps
happy) to being quite troubled to being happy again, but wiser for
the experience. This impression resonates with the results of Hard-
castle (1985), who found that among functioning “ordinary folks,”
experiences judged to be most meaningful were often difficult life
experiences. Research on posttraumatic growth tends to portray
personal growth as coming out of extreme life circumstances (e.g.,
Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995). Sometimes, psychologists will dub such
perceived change “dissonance reduction” or positive illusion (cf.
Taylor & Armor, 1996). Another way to think about personal growth
through difficult life circumstances is to recognize that it is the de-
sire to be happy again that necessitates personality development.
That is, one cannot be happy when one’s meaning structures are so
at variance with the world of experience. Perhaps the happy, ma-
ture person matures to be happy. Noam (1998) suggested that ma-
turity ought to include psychological adjustment. We might sug-
gest that the mature, miserable person is less integrated than the
mature, happy person—that the miserable, mature person is still
maturing. Truthfully, there does seem to be something undone
about a story without a happy ending.
One problem of looking on the bright side of negative life events
is that the struggle to see the bright side is often lost. The power of
benefit-finding (Affleck & Tennen, 1996) to redeem even the most
negative life circumstances has been popularized in the saying
“It’s all good”—as if nothing legitimately negative ever really hap-
pens. Although it is possible that, eventually, “It is all good,” get-
ting to that conclusion may be difficult and serious work. In our
research, we have found that individuals who are assigned to write
only about the positive aspects of their negative life event still
68 The Hard Road to the Good Life

found the activity to be difficult and important—they simply found

it less upsetting than writing about trauma alone. Thus, rather
than viewing personal growth through life experience as a means
of coping with the facts, we might begin to see such change as part
of the hard work of accommodation and as part of constructing a
self that can be happy in one’s present circumstances.
In conclusion, it is worthwhile to note that maturity is surely not
the only variable we might seek to combine with happiness in our
examinations of the good life. In addition, future research might
focus on desirable but clearly unhappy lives in order to continue to
broaden our understanding of all of life’s goods. Research that
brings a level of sophistication and a realistic view of the healthy,
mature person is vital to a continuing positive psychology that
doesn’t pathologize positive or negative emotional experiences.
The rich tapestry of human life certainly bears witness to the vari-
ety of ways the good life exists. Although happiness may be one
important thread, the fabric of life is more than silk and spun gold.
Surely, bad days and bad times are part of the good life.

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Reprint requests: Laura A. King, Psychology Department, Southern Methodist

University, Dallas, TX 75275-0442; e-mail: [email protected].