It's Saturday afternoon and you finally have a moment to breathe. You've ticked things off your to-do list, the house is mostly in order, and you should feel good - maybe even happy. But instead, there's a faint tug of "not enough": Not productive enough. Not healthy enough. Not successful enough. Not happy enough. This is the happiness paradox: The more we chase happiness, the more it slips away.
When it comes to love, this rule doesn't just distort memory; it reshapes how we evaluate our relationships. It influences the way we decide whether to stay, go, or grow. That makes it far more than a curious quirk of memory. It is, in fact, a bias with real consequences for how we choose and sustain our bonds. Understanding how the peak-end rule works can help us consciously redesign our relationships in ways that resist such distortion, allowing us to remember them more truthfully.