Suppose I have divorce fantasies and ask myself the classic question: ‘Should I stay or should I go?’. This is not an easy position to be in, so I turn to a marriage counselor for advice. After hearing my predicament, she answers: ‘The sooner you consider the research, the sooner you will be prepared to make a decision based on reason rather than intuition.’ She goes on to explain that I should remember that having the right partner will not bring me one hundred percent happiness all the time and that maybe divorce isn’t the answer. On the other hand, she continues, divorce does not irreparably harm most children according to the majority of studies. I personally would appreciate the information given by the counselor, for it would allow me to make an informed decision, but I would not pay her a second because her counseling was not in contact with my reality. Going through all the relevant facts laid out in a number of meta-analyses on divorce and its consequences, will not make my decision making process any easier. The marriage counselor in the example above does not exist, but the words I put in her mouth are taken from the book The myths of Happiness by the prominent happiness scholar Sonja Lyubomirsky. Lyubomirsky favors making important life decisions based on a rational analysis, but in my mind this is an impossible ideal to achieve, because we can never know all the relevant facts, especially about an unknown future. One problem is that the empirical studies Lyubomirsky refers to might or might not be valid for individual circumstances. Knowledge drawn from empirical happiness studies are not ‘good enough’ for personal decisions. In happiness studies, the empirical generalizations deal with short-term effects of decisions, but the long term-effects are usually unknown. Having children regularly comes at the cost of reduced happiness because of the loss of sleep and the stress involved (e.g. Pouwels 2011), but less is known about the long-term impact and consequences of