The Harvard study of adult development- Why healthy relationships are important

In November 2015, Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, delivered a talk for Tedx. The talk was titled “What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness,” and it became the most viewed talk in TedTalk history. The talk highlighted the findings of the longest-running study on happiness, well-being, and the importance of a good relationship.

Waldinger opens his speech by asking the audience about their long-term life goals. He shares that in a survey of millennials, 80% said their most important life goal was to be rich, and 50% of those 80% also said that another goal of theirs was to be famous.

The study followed 724 men and is currently going on year 86. The study began with 724 men. These men were chosen in 1938 and then cut into two groups. The first group was sophomores at Harvard College. They all finished college in World War II; most men left and served in the war. The second group were boys from Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. All the participants were interviewed and went through medical exams. Their parents were even interviewed. These men would grow up and become many different things. In Waldinger’s talk, he mentioned that they became doctors, lawyers, and factory workers; some men developed alcoholism and a few developed schizophrenia. One of the men became president of the United States. He also stated that some men went from the bottom of the social ladder to the top, and others did the opposite.

These men were interviewed about work, their home lives, and their health. Their wives were also interviewed about concerns they may have, and their children were also interviewed. The researchers went so in-depth with their interviews that they would also receive their medical records from the participants’ doctors, draw blood, and even scan their brains.

Most studies like this do not last as long as this one has. Most have participants that drop out, the funding dries up, or researchers get distracted with other projects or even die, and nobody carries the study afterward. Waldinger was the study’s fourth director, and he passed away in 2023; his assistant director is now the head director. This study has gone through several generations of researchers, and only 60 of the original 724 men were alive at the time of this talk. All of them were in their 90s at the time, and as of 2017, 19 of them were alive. They started studying the more than 2,000 children of those 724 men.

“The clearest message that we got from this 75-year study is this,” Waldinger said. “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.”

It was declared that social connections are beneficial for us, and loneliness is deadly. In the study, when the men hit their 50s, researchers predicted which of these men would live the longest. The men who were satisfied in their relationships lived longer than those who didn’t regardless of their physical health. When the participants were in their 80s, those happily coupled reported that their positive mood remained the same even on their most physically painful days. Still, those who were not in happy relationships reported their physically painful days were magnified by their mental pain.

“At any given time, one in five Americans will report they are lonely,” Waldinger said.

Isolated people are less happy, their health declines in midlife, their brain function declines, and they live shorter lives. People can be lonely in a crowd or in a marriage. It is not about the number of friends or whether someone is in a committed relationship; it is about the quality of close relationships.