Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (26 page)

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, to age successfully is to transcend decay. The task of Integrity is to retain human dignity despite the ravages of mortality. This is not a task particular to old age; it is the developmental challenge of all those who face imminent death. At fifty-two, Grant Study member Dr. Eric Carey knew already that he was doomed to an early death from complications of polio. From his wheelchair he articulated the challenge that faced him: “The frustration of seeing what needs to be done and how to do it but being unable to carry it out because of physical limitations . . . has been one of the daily pervading problems of my life in the last four years.” But three years later, he had answered his own challenge: “I have coped . . . by limiting my activities (occupational and social) to the essential ones and the ones that are within the scope of my abilities.” To be able to honor life’s essentials and simultaneously bow to its realities is Integrity in a nutshell.

At fifty-seven, Dr. Carey told the Study that the last five years had been the happiest of his life: “I came to a new sense of fruition and peace with self, wife and children.” He spoke of peace, and his actions portrayed it. He understood that, whenever possible, legacies (both concrete and metaphoric) should be bestowed before death.

At sixty-two, he talked about the risky anesthesia he had recently required for an operation. “Every group gives percentages for people who will die: one out of three will get cancer, one out of five will get
heart
disease, but in reality one out of one will die. Everybody is mortal.” He was dead a year later from pulmonary insufficiency.

As the Study member I quoted above pointed out, it’s the old who can teach us that life is worthwhile “to its very end.” That is a lesson that it took me, young and arrogant maven of adult development that I once was, thirty years to learn.

6

MARRIAGE

If you have someone who loves you, you’ve got it made.

—CHARLES BOATWRIGHT,
Study Interview

MENTAL HEALTH AND THE CAPACITY
to love are linked, but the linkages are elusive. We can’t weigh love on a scale, or examine it with special lenses. Poets can encompass it up to a point, but for most of us, psychologists and psychiatrists included, it’s something of a mystery. The importance of intimate, warm, mutual attachment (not just sex, and not even the biological/instinctual drive often called
Eros
) is the third lesson of the Grant Study. But no aspect of human behavior is assessed more subjectively, or measured less easily, than intimacy.

Fortunately this doesn’t stop us from enjoying love anyway—not only in its passionate aspects, but also in the enduring warmth and comfort of close relationship. Here, for instance, is Charles Boatwright at age eighty-five on the pleasures of his second marriage: “Really just being together. Share each other’s lives and our children’s lives. Snuggle on cold nights.” Jim Hart, who at eighty-one participated with his wife, Julia, in director Robert Waldinger’s Study of Marital Intimacy, told the Study that she was the essence of his life, and called their relationship “a lovely, lovely partnership.” What are his hopes for his marriage? “I want it to stay like it is,” Jim says. “Period. It can’t get better.” Julia’s view of it? They’re best friends, and there’s a physical relationship, if not quite what it was when they were young. But the main thing is: “I adore him. More than I ever did. We laugh a lot. We laugh
at
ourselves. . . .You can’t take yourself too seriously. . . . I don’t know how we got here, but it’s wonderful.”

This kind of pleasure in the company of another person is quite different from Eriksonian Intimacy as we dealt with it in the last chapter, and throughout this chapter I’ll be making a distinction between the two. Eriksonian Intimacy, like puberty, is a developmental task. It comes later to some people than others, but most of us get there. As fledglings fly from the parental nest, we all must leave our parents’ homes and establish ourselves emotionally in the peer world, sharing space, money, decisions, plans, and other issues of mutual interdependence. The Harvard Study of Adult Development defined Eriksonian Intimacy operationally as ten years of living in an interdependent and committed relationship. But that commitment can take very different forms.

Eriksonian Intimacy is an intimacy of physical and practical proximity. The emotional intimacy of deep relatedness is different. Some couples have a shared emotional economy. There’s a constant circulation between them; they’re under each other’s skin, and happy to have it so. This isn’t the blurred boundary of codependency; it’s a mutuality based on a clear sense of self and other. But it is a knack, like the huge hand-span of a great pianist. Not everyone has it or wants it, and it is not necessary for a fulfilling life.

This chapter will address four questions: What does emotional intimacy look like? What can we learn from marriages that have endured for fifty years or more? What can we learn from marriages that don’t endure? And what do intimacy and mental health have to do with each other?

Investigation of the Grant Study marriages was an eye-opener for me. Although I stand by my rash assertion to
The Atlantic
that relationship (that is, the capacity for loving attachment) is what matters most
in
life, I can’t quite say the same for this pronouncement from my first book: “In the Grant Study, there was probably no single longitudinal variable that predicted mental health as clearly as a man’s capacity to remain happily married over time.”
1
In 1977, I firmly believed that divorce boded statistically ill for future development and future happiness. But it has since become clear that this was yet another premature conclusion.

Before I proceed, here in
Table 6.1
is a summary of the Grant Study men’s marital histories. We’ll be referring to it as we go on.

As you can see, these numbers include all marriages either through 2010, or until one of the partners died. One hundred and seventy-three of the men’s first marriages remained intact, including fifty-one happy ones, seventy-three average ones (which we called “so-so”), and forty-nine unhappy ones. Seventy-four men, including twenty-three of the sixty-two who once divorced, contracted very happy remarriages that have stayed that way through 2010, or through the death of
a
partner. The thirty-seven remaining divorced men either did not remarry or remarried unhappily.

Table
6.1
Life Course of Study Marriages (1940 through 2010, or until the death of one partner)

*
26 of the 268 original Study members were excluded from
Table 6.1
. Four of them died in the war, three never married, and 19 withdrew from the Study.

**
One man who lived happily all his life with another man in a close interdependent relationship was classified as “Still married; very happy.”

The mean length of marriage for the surviving couples still in their first and only marriage was over sixty years. That’s a nice statistic, if not a surprising one. But the mean length of remarriage for the twenty-three divorced but happily remarried men was almost thirty-five years, a finding that required me, as I will recount in a moment, to rethink
de novo
my assumptions about divorce, mental health, and the capacity for intimacy.

RATING MARRIAGES

How did we know who was happily married and who wasn’t? The short answer is: the men told us, repeatedly. Cynics may wonder how many of them were Pollyannas like Boatwright, or possibly even outright liars. But we had decades of prospective follow-up in our files; there was plenty of objective information against which to test their subjective reports. I don’t contend that men in the Study never lied to us or to themselves about their marriages, but it is hard to maintain deception for fifty years and more.

Where did our information come from? Qualitative responses to questionnaires and interviews were a major source. The men’s wives were sent questionnaires, too. Most couples were interviewed together at about age thirty. After that there were no planned couple interviews (although there were some adventitious ones) until Study director Robert Waldinger began interviewing the surviving men and their wives together and separately on videotape. The recordings—another forward-looking investment—are being saved for future study.
2
In scoring responses, we always used multiple independent raters, each blind to all other information about the men. That way we avoided
the
halo effects that can plague longitudinal studies, where raters’ assessments are contaminated by what they know about successes or failures in the past.

A second source was multiple-choice questions. To quantify elusive intuitions about marital satisfaction, we asked husbands to complete a simple multiple-choice scale on five questionnaires between their thirty-fifth and seventieth years. Wives did the same three times, between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five. The four questions whose answers correlated most highly with marital satisfaction were:
3

1. Solutions to disagreements generally come: 1=easily, 2= moderately hard, 3=always difficult, 4=we go on without a solution

2. How stable do you think your marriage is? 1=quite stable, 2=some minor weaknesses, 3=moderate weaknesses, 4=major weaknesses, 5 =not stable

3.
Sexual adjustment is, on the whole: 1=very satisfying, 2=satisfying, 3 =at times not as good as wished, 4=rather poor

4. Separation or divorce has been considered: 1=never, 2=only casually, 3 =seriously

The scores on these four questions were summed into a global assessment of marital adjustment: the lower the score, the happier the marriage.

The men’s own subjective ratings were a third source of data; three times between the ages of seventy and ninety they rated their marriages on a scale of 1 (very unhappy) to 6 (very happy).

At about sixty, the husbands and wives filled out a chart in which they retrospectively rated their marriages in five-year chunks as:
1
=Very enjoyable, 2=Not one of the very best periods, 3=Rocky, 4=Divorce considered.

Our final way of assessing the Study marriages was to look for comments the men made about them outside of specifically marriage-related contexts. This allowed us to test yet again the reliability of their multiple-choice statements. Here are some spontaneous comments made by men who scored their marriages poorly:

“She has an inferiority complex.”

“I am more affectionate than her.”

“She likes her beer.”

“It’s easier to suffer with her than without her.”

“We sleep in separate rooms.”

“When she throws the plates, I catch them. I never throw them back. When she hits me, I never hit her back.” (This man added, however, “Although I’ve slapped her to bring her to her senses”—a good example of a fifty-plus-year marriage that was scored as chronically unhappy.)

The following quotes were characteristic of happy marriages:

“My wife is the kindest and most considerate person I have ever known.”

“Our marriage is completely challenging, completely exciting.”

“Tennis doubles with my wife is my greatest enjoyment.”

“I am very proud of her.”

“I
love and admire her; she is my best friend.”

“Our marriage is GREAT. My wife has been the best thing that ever happened to me.”

A dichotomy between good and bad marriages may be hard to establish when feelings are looked at moment to moment, but it is real enough over time.

There were two areas in which our data were weak. The men were loath to return questionnaires that inquired too specifically into their sex lives. Too much curiosity on our part was firmly ignored, and we had to settle for global generalizations. More on this in a bit. Also, the worse the marriage, the less information was forthcoming about it from either husband or wife, which limits my capacity to illustrate a very troubled marriage in a life study. Agatha Penn, for instance, declined to return any of the questionnaires sent to her, or otherwise participate in Study contacts. She also discouraged her husband from responding to inquiries sent to him.

A THIRTY-YEAR CHALLENGE

In 1977 I handed in the manuscript of
Adaptation to Life.
My editor at Little, Brown, Lewellen Howland, took issue with my contention that divorce was a serious indicator of poor mental health, and suggested gently, “George, it is not that divorce is bad; it is that loving people for a long time is good.” I liked his sentiment, but I didn’t believe him, despite the fact that I myself was in a happy second marriage at age forty. (We’re all the exceptions to our own rules.) The numbers I’d been working with for the previous ten years didn’t look promising at all. By 1967, seventeen men had divorced. By 1973, fourteen of them had been remarried for longer than a year. Of those fourteen second marriages, eight had already ended in divorce again—you’ll hear
about
two of those in a little while—and four more showed weaknesses that kept them securely out of the good marriage category. In other words, of the fourteen remarriages, only two looked to be anything like happy, and they were still too new to be trusted. Louie’s a romantic, I thought. All I have to do is wait for thirty years and I’ll be able to show him his error.