1: It was the opening game of the 1995 football season for the University of Michigan Wolverines.
Professor Barbara Fredrickson was a new member of the faculty. A colleague had encouraged her and her husband to attend the game because “that’s what we do here.”
So off they went, he recalls in her book Love 2.0: Creating Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection.
Together, they entered one of the world’s largest outdoor stadiums, the University of Michigan’s “Big House,” which seats over one hundred thousand fans.
“The game—the Pigskin Classic against the University of Virginia and debut for new head coach Lloyd Carr—turned out to be one for the record books,” Barbara writes.
“Although Michigan had been favored, well into the fourth quarter, the Virginia Cavaliers had the Wolverines shut out at 0–17. Somehow, though, the Wolverines pulled off two touchdowns that put the score at 12–17.
The kicker, however, missed the two extra points, so Michigan needed another touchdown to win the game.
Time was winding down. “With just four seconds left on the clock, Michigan quarterback Scott Dreisbach threw a Hail Mary pass to Mercury Hayes,” she writes. “The stadium fell into near-silence with the tension of it all.
“Running deep into the end zone, Hayes caught the ball with his left foot just brushing the turf before sheer momentum forced him out of bounds.”
Touchdown! The win was one of the greatest comebacks in Michigan football history.
2: “The stadium exploded into celebratory cheers, high fives, and backslapping hugs,” Barbara writes. “Virtually everybody present was part of one massive burst of celebration.
“I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life—before or since,” she writes. “More than one hundred thousand people—all strangers to us at the time—were sharing the same boisterous euphoria (save for a few Cavalier fans).”
Entering the stadium that day, she remembers not “expecting anything in particular.” Afterward, she became “a die-hard Michigan football fan. For the first time in my life, I devoured the `sports pages, donned maize and blue, and fretted if I had to miss a game. That single game cemented me within my new community.”
3: Barbara is a thought leader in positive psychology. That day, she experienced an intense moment of shared positivity.
“Moments of seemingly shared positivity abound,” she writes. We “and those in our midst, can be infused with one form of positivity or another yet not be truly connected.
“[We] and everyone else in the movie theater, for instance, share the positivity emanating from the big screen; we and the person next to us in the lecture hall are fascinated by the same set of new ideas; we and our family members take in the same television comedy.
“Yet absent eye contact, touch, laughter, or another form of behavioral synchrony, these moments are akin to what developmental psychologists call parallel play,” she observes.
An even higher plane of emotion exists: Love. What Barbara calls the “supreme emotion.”
Tomorrow, we will explore the conditions under which love is created and experienced.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Have I ever had an experience similar to Barbara’s Michigan football experience?
Action: Discuss with a family member, friend, or colleague.