The longest-running examination of the lifetime well-being of a single group of people is the Study of Adult Development at Harvard Medical School, also known as the Grant Study, for one of its creators. You might have heard of it. In 1938, researchers at Harvard recruited 268 undergraduate men, and followed them for the next eighty years. The length of the study and its detail are astounding. Researchers measured the men’s IQ, analyzed their handwriting, and examined their brows and testicles. They drew blood, took electroencephalograms, and calculated their lifetime earnings. The audacious goal was to try to determine why some people flourished in work and life and others floundered.
Despite its obvious limitations—the subjects were all white American men—the Grant Study is one of the most important long-term projects in the history of psychological science. Researchers eventually included the offspring and spouses of these men in the study. And in the 1970s they added 456 working-class Bostonians to diversify the socioeconomic pool. The combined conclusions of these efforts are considered serious, instructive, and probably universal.
As the Harvard Gazette summarized in 2017:
Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. . . . Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants.[7]
Men who’d had warm childhood relationships with their parents earned more as adults than men whose parent-child bonds were more strained. They were also happier and less likely to suffer dementia in old age. People with strong marriages suffered less physical pain and emotional distress over the course of their lives. Individuals’ close friendships were more accurate predictors of healthy aging than their cholesterol levels. Social support and connections to a community helped insulate people against disease and depression. Meanwhile, loneliness and disconnection, in some cases, were fatal.
In 2017, Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist and the current director of the study, described to a journalist the core insight of the research: “Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”[8]
Many people in the World Regret Survey seem to have arrived at a conclusion similar to what the Grant Study found. Take, for example, this fifty-seven-year-old California woman:
I regret that I didn’t cuddle more with my stepdaughter when she was a child. I didn’t want her to think I was trying to replace her mother, and didn’t realize how much she needed to be mothered.
Or a sixty-two-year-old Ohio woman, who said:
Both my parents, although a year apart, did their hospice at my home. I deeply regret not spending more time on their last days holding hands and speaking about the lovely moments they gave me. We weren’t a family that hugged, cried, or kissed, and I didn’t know I needed to do that—for them or for me.
Or this seventy-one-year-old Floridian:
When my daughter came out as transgender at the age of fourteen, I did not understand and did not handle the situation well. As a result, I inflicted incredible pain on my only child and the person I love most in this world. Things have changed since then and I am her number one supporter now, but I will never forgive myself for not being the parent I should have been when it mattered most.
One remarkable (non)finding in the World Regret Survey involved parents. Hundreds of people described regrets about marrying the wrong spouse or choosing a disappointing partner, but fewer than twenty respondents out of more than sixteen thousand regretted having children.[9] In some sense, both behavioral science and popular culture have focused too much attention on romance and not enough on other forms of family connection. In fact, in 2020, a group of more than forty international scholars, representing two dozen countries, examined data from twenty-seven societies around the world and concluded that while academic journals were packed with research on mate-seeking, people across the globe actually “prioritize goals related to familial bonds over mating goals.”[10] Directing more research to long-term family relationships, which produce greater and more enduring well-being with fewer downsides than romantic entanglements, would expand our understanding.
George Vaillant, another Harvard psychiatrist, headed the Grant Study for more than thirty years. In an unpublished 2012 manuscript, he reflected on what he’d learned from the experience. After eight decades, hundreds of subjects, thousands of interviews, and millions of data points, he said he could summarize the conclusion of the longest-running examination of human flourishing in five words: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”[11]
In the end, the problem we contend with as people is remarkably simple. What give our lives significance and satisfaction are meaningful relationships. But when those relationships come apart, whether by intent or inattention, what stands in the way of bringing them back together are feelings of awkwardness. We fear that we’ll botch our efforts to reconnect, that we’ll make our intended recipients even more uncomfortable. Yet these concerns are almost always misplaced. Sure, we’ll get rebuffed sometimes. But more often—much more often, in fact—we overestimate how awkward we’ll feel and underestimate how much others will welcome our overtures.
So, this simple problem has an even simpler solution. Shove aside the awkwardness.
When Amy Knobler considers her closed door regret, she wishes she could travel backward in time and whisper advice to her previous self. She’d assure young Amy “that even though it feels awkward, and it is super uncomfortable and scary, on the other side of it, you will be glad that you went through that experience, not only because you don’t have those unanswered questions in your mind at that point, but also for what it does for the other person.”
And when Cheryl Johnson gazes at the open door of her relationship with Jen, she has an instinct about her next move even if she won’t—for now at least—act on it: “You’re almost always better off to err on the side of showing up. And if it’s awkward, then it’s awkward and you’ll live. It’ll be fine. But if you don’t show up, it’s lost forever.”