Is happiness is only real when shared?

Happiness is only real when shared. Written in Arabic.

I passed by this quote in a book I read many years ago.

I always found myself dismissing this quote: one should be happy in solitude, as much as one should be happy alongside people. None less than the other, right?

In the past, I searched for happiness in cities I couldn’t pronounce.

But looking back through a countless receipts of experiences, missing gaps within my denial were found — not on happiness per se, but on recalling those moments.

Because on somedays like today, noted only for a freshly painted street markings and a cold blue breeze from the sea, when a message from an old friends was received; floods of memories poured into me that I never knew existed. I started to realise that memories are like puzzle pieces; each person holds different pieces of the same experience, that could only be fully relived once shared.

And those pieces were not found hidden under cities that can’t be pronounced, instead with friends whose names are never grown tired of. Or even faded memories of strangers; any presence of humans adds depths to the pieces of memories we hold.

Every happy memory was enhanced alongside those interactions of friends, humans and sometimes feline. They were not found amid exotic monuments and places, but amid local restaurants, cheap coffee shops, on curbs and between road signage. Where the location is not as interesting as the words, happiness and coffee shared.

This made me question how we really perceive memories. Are sunsets experienced, if we had no one to acknowledge its beauty? Are poems real, if there was no one to recite them? Does the karak or gelato really taste better, here than the other locations? The repetition of experiences confirms our inner hypothesis of happiness and memories.

Perhaps we subconsciously realise that happiness becomes more true when it is shared. Perhaps it is the reason that when we stop to admire the view, we look around to acknowledge others are also validating our view. Perhaps, it’s the reason people tell stories — how the young share pictures and the old repeat their memories over and over again as their missing puzzle pieces have left their world.

Perhaps then, happiness is true within us, and it is only a reality once shared. As linguistically, truth is a fact that is yet to be proved, while reality is a fact that is fully existent.

While we should always be content with truths, the reality of those truths; where someone, anyone, admires a story of ours, or recites a poem, or shares a photo, or a redraws a painting, further relieves us that those memories and happiness did really exist, and that the reality is:

Happiness is only real when shared.