1: The year was 2016. Katherine was visiting the offices of the Harvard Study of Adult Development in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Why? Her father, Leo DeMarco, was one of the original 724 participants in the longest in-depth longitudinal Study of human life ever done.
Now in its eighth decade, the Study had expanded to include three generations and more than 1,300 descendants of those original participants.
“Leo, a high school teacher, had four children,” Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write in The Good Life. “Three of them continue to participate in the Study.”
Every five years, study participants agree to be interviewed in person and take a series of assessments of their physical health and approach to navigating emotional challenges.
2: “During these visits,” the authors write, “which typically took about half a day, we ask participants to share memories of a difficult or low moment in their lives. These experiences are illuminating from both a human and a scientific point of view, since low moments are often formative and also give us some indication of how people cope with difficulties.”
The interviewer asked Katherine to share a difficult time in her life.
“When my husband and I were trying to become parents for the first time,” she recalled, “I had four miscarriages in a relatively short period of time. This was probably the first time in my life that I felt that things were out of my control.
“There is the saying that you learn more from failure than you do from success, and looking back on this time is when I learned that. It tested me and my husband, and I remember being aware that we needed to be on the same page as a couple so the desire for becoming a family did not become all-consuming in our lives.”
She continued: “This was a period that brought a lot of sadness to me and my husband. But I also look back to it as a time that we learned to really be a team when the going got tough. We also consciously chose to not let the experience of trying to start a family take over our lives. We had chosen each other as partners and we needed to take care of each other, with or without children.”
In spite of the challenging situation Katherine and her husband found themselves in, their instincts were to love each other.
Which highlights the key finding of the eight-decade Study: “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period,” Bob and Marc write.
“Relationships are not just essential as stepping-stones to other things, and they are not simply a functional route to health and happiness,” the authors note.
“They are ends in themselves. Katherine cared deeply about having a child, but she understood that nurturing her marriage was vital and important in and of itself, whether they reached the goal of parenthood together or not.”
3: The secret to living a good life is not the self. Instead, it is found in our connection to others. That’s the number one lesson for the Harvard Study.
“From the biggest heartbreaks to the subtle sensations of camaraderie to the sadness of loss to the exhilarations of romantic love; or as Jon Kabat-Zinn called it, borrowing a line from Zorba the Greek, ‘the full catastrophe,’ the authors write. “It’s there that the good life happens, in the real-time, momentary experience of connection.”
We may be thinking: That sounds great. But how do I improve the relationships in my life?
“I can’t just snap my fingers,” we think. “What would change even look like?” “Where do I start?”
Changing how we live our lives is not easy. “Many of us start out with the best of intentions to improve our lives,” they note, “only to be overwhelmed by the force of our well-worn mental habits and the momentum of the culture we live in.”
It’s easy to fall into the trap of saying, “I’ve tried, but I cannot figure this out. I’ll just go with the flow.”
That’s what Katherine could have done. She might have spiraled downward.
Instead, “she was able to recognize what was outside of her control—whether she could carry a pregnancy to term—and what was within her control—how she could nurture her relationship with her husband,” the authors write. “They were able to maintain a close and forgiving relationship throughout this trial in their life.”
Eventually, Katherine became pregnant and gave birth to a son, whom she called her “Miracle Baby.”
“But even before that final outcome,” Bob and Marc note, “Katherine had won an important battle. She’d faced a difficult challenge head-on, made good choices about how she would respond to it, and turned her attention toward nurturing the relationship that was affected and that would help her through the ordeal.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How can I apply Katherine’s approach of focusing on what’s within my control and nurturing my relationships during challenging times in my own life?
Action: I will identify one relationship in my life that needs nurturing and take a concrete step today to strengthen that connection, such as reaching out for a meaningful conversation or planning a shared activity.