«Good relationships make us happier and healthier. Period,» said Harvard University psychiatry professor Robert Waldinger in a lecture he recorded for TED in 2015. This is how he summarized the main findings of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the world’s longest-running study on adult living conditions and development.
The project began in 1938 with a study of 268 male Harvard students (Harvard was predominantly «male» at the time) in parallel with a similar survey of 456 adolescents from disadvantaged suburbs of Boston. The researchers were interested in everything from the shape of their brow arches and heart rate after a 5-minute jog to the social history of their parents and when and how the boys first learned about sex.
The project was initially planned to last 20-25 years but lasted more than 80 years. In 2017, 19 people from the original group were alive, all in their 90s or older. The participants underwent regular psychological examinations, medical examinations, and family interviews. Later, the participants’ wives were included in the study: the researchers did not just send out questionnaires but talked to the participants in their homes, studied their blood tests and brain scans, videotaped them discussing problems with their spouses, and talked to their children. The study is ongoing: the first cohort of children participates in the project, and the researchers plan to include the third generation.
Over many years, scientists embarked on a comprehensive study to uncover the factors influencing our physical and mental well-being. This study was no ordinary research project. It involved tracking participants’ lives from their school days to their golden years, documenting their career highs and lows, marital status changes, and physical and mental health. The result was a wealth of information that provided insights into what truly makes us healthy and happy throughout our lives.
The study’s most significant finding was that close relationships, more than money or fame, profoundly impact our happiness. These connections shield us against life’s challenges, help stave off mental and physical decline, and ultimately determine our long-term happiness and health. This revelation held true for all participants, regardless of their social status, intelligence, or genetic makeup. It’s a universal truth that the quality of our relationships is the key to our well-being.
One striking example of the study’s findings is relationships’ impact on physical health. As the current director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, Waldinger, puts it, «The level of satisfaction with relationships at age 50 was a better predictor of physical health at age 80 than cholesterol levels.» This statement underscores the profound influence of our relationships on our long-term well-being.
The vitality of close relationships
Waldinger listed three key findings from the study on the importance of social connections, which ultimately prove more important to happiness than wealth, fame, or a successful career.
- First, loneliness kills, while connections with others are beneficial. Those who reported strong relationships with family and friends are happier, healthier physically, and live longer than those who are lonely.
- Second, It’s not the sheer number of friends or having a spouse/partner that matters, but the quality of relationships with them. Conflicted marriages, where partners have little attachment to each other, affect health, perhaps even worse than divorce.
- A third finding is that good relationships protect not only the body but also the brain. People in their 80s with a solid attachment to another person had better memory and retained it longer than those in less strong relationships. That said, a good relationship doesn’t have to be «smooth» all the time — some of the older couples might fight with each other day in and day out, but as long as they feel they can count on each other in a difficult situation, those fights didn’t affect their health.
One of the scientific papers based on this study showed that love could even reduce suffering from physical pain: older people living in happy marriages reported that on days when they felt physical pain, it did not worsen their mood, while those living in unhappy marriages on such days experienced along with physical and emotional pain.
The Harvard scientists’ project became the basis for dozens of academic articles, the authors of which explored many aspects of human life, physical and mental health, successful aging, the stability of social ties, and their impact on the quality of life. Harvard Medical School professor George Vaillant, who joined the study in 1966 and led it from 1972 to 2004, has also written several books using the results of years of participant observation. One of them, Adaptation to Life, focuses on how people overcome difficult situations and has become near-classic.
In Triumphs of Experience, Weillant showed that the human personality constantly evolves. It is not necessarily the case that those who do not experience happiness in adulthood are destined for an unhappy old age, and vice versa.
By showing that the level of relationship satisfaction in middle age is a good predictor of healthy aging, the study debunked the myth that by age 30, a person’s personality is «frozen» and cannot be changed. Those who failed in their 20s and 25s turned out to be prosperous 80-year-olds, Weillant told The Harvard Gazette. On the other hand, he noted, people who started their lives as «stars» were reduced to rubble by the end of their lives because of alcoholism and depression.
The Supermen of Wellbeing
Launched during the Great Depression, the research was intended, in the words of the project’s founder, therapist Arlie Bock, to «help reduce the disharmony of the world.» Bock intended to move away from the medical tendency to study deviance and wanted to focus on «normal» people: «To alleviate the disharmony of the world as a whole, we must begin with the successful person, not the unsuccessful, the frustrated, or the sick.»
In the early years, the project was funded by William Thomas Grant, founder of a chain of department stores in the United States and a philanthropist. Grant hoped that a long-term study of healthy men would help him identify effective managers, and Dr. Bock also hoped the study would help the United States, about to be drawn into World War II, select the best officer candidates, Weillant wrote: «They were interested in identifying supermen, not best friends.»
Weillant focused on how and how effectively the study participants responded to life’s challenges — it was the ways they coped with failure, he argued, that determined how successfully they grew up and aged.
These defense mechanisms are akin to fundamental biological processes, Weillant compared in an interview with The Atlantic: if a person cuts themselves, their blood curdles, and similarly, when people are faced with a problem — the death of a loved one or a disagreement at work — survival mechanisms help them cope with the emotional situation. However, just as blood clotting can stop bleeding but also clot an artery with a blood clot and kill, adaptation mechanisms can save and complicate life.
Weillant identified four categories of adaptive mechanisms. The most unhealthy, or «psychotic,» defenses — paranoia, hallucinations, megalomania — while they can make reality tolerable to the person using them, seem insane to everyone else. A level higher are the «immature» adaptations, which include, for example, passive aggression, hypochondria, and fantasies; they are not as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they interfere with close relationships.
A third mechanism, «neurotic» defenses, is common in «normal» people: these defenses include dissociation (strong, often short-term detachment from one’s feelings) and suppression of emotions, among others. The fourth category is the healthiest, or «mature,» defense mechanisms: altruism, humor, anticipation (the ability to look ahead and prepare for trouble if it’s likely), and sublimation (finding appropriate outlets for feelings — for example, giving aggression an outlet through sports).
«When the study began, no one cared about empathy or attachment. But the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships,» Weillant is convinced. Social status, intelligence, and physical fitness are far less critical to successful maturation and aging than relationships; he concludes: «Love begets Love… Happiness is Love. Period.»
Pederast and Love are not compatible! It’s a sad picture!
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