Also featured are summaries of the original plots, advice columns by love experts, and ten ways to get over a broken heart. Martinet is a longtime fan of romance comics and dates only men with dark blue hair and sleek convertibles. Monogamy is thus an unnatural state. Finally, they explore what these new findings mean for humans in terms of relationships, parenting, and aggression. But over the last two hundred years happiness has become more quantifiable.
Surveys measure emotional intelligence to find the happiest people on earth and the most miserable.
Love is measured by possessions and moments of delight. Crime rates can be made to correspond to random speeches or to sunspots, and a city's success is judged by the number and type of restaurants. Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a whiskey-maker, a fisherman, and a man who, with his wife Ava, raised seven children in the Great Depression. He worked at a steel mill when it was rolling, or for bacon or peaches when it wasn't. He paid the doctor who delivered one of his children with a jar of whiskey.