Hi and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz show on I Heart Radio.

There's a book that I love called Stumbling on Happiness.

It's one of the few books that really change the way I see the world, see myself,

see experiences and memories and dreams for the future.

In the book, psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues that we assume that what makes us happy today will make us happy in the future too.

We don't imagine all the things that may happen to us that could change our perspective.

Present You knows very little definitively about what future you will desire.

One thing about me is that I never wanted to get married or have children.

My three kids love hearing that story. I never awed at

babies or daydreamed about my wedding. I've written before that I pictured myself

at 80, alone and fabulous in sequins and false eyelashes

smoking cigarettes at a hotel bar. The thought of the kind of commitment that

kids require kept me up at night. I wanted to be free. I wasn't into

tattoos and I wasn't into babies. The permanence was not for me. And the thing is I

was always with really good guys. I look back at my exes and I'm generally

proud to have picked them but they were still all wrong for me. A question I get

a lot from single women who don't want to be is how to pick better people.

But the truth is that even if you're not into jerks or bad boys or whatever,

the person can still be wrong for you.

Had I married any of those really great men I would have been

settling. There was a hit book a number of years ago called Marry Him the case for

settling for Mr Good Enough by Lori Gottlieb. A woman wakes up at 40 and realizes she should have just

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