What makes a good life?

An 87-year longitudinal study by Harvard found the answer to this centuries-old question for men: good relationships, including a good marriage. For women? It's a bit more complicated.

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In the spring of 1973, I wrote my first memoir, A Good Life. Obviously, as a first grader, I’d lived sufficiently long enough to write a memoir, and I knew everything about everything. But now my 59-year-old self is here in the future to report that this first foray into answering the question of what makes a good life was short on prescriptives and long on irrelevant tangents.

On the other hand, the existence of this artifact on my bookshelf is telling. In the passage above, the seven-year-old who was me seemed to be quite upset that she missed out on not one but two Valentine’s Days because of illnesses. (The horror!) And yet it must be said: fifty-two years later, I find myself still writing and thinking about the overlap between love and health, and the question of what makes a good life still feels like the question I’ve been asking myself, both professionally and personally, ever since.

Fast forward to 2023. Dr. Robert Waldinger publishes his own The Good Life. You might recall Waldinger—psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Zen priest, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest study on human happiness in existence— from his 2015 TED talk, still one of the most popular TED talks of all time.

I urge everyone to watch the entire twelve-minutes, but the key TLDR moment for me came at 7:26. Here’s what Dr. Waldinger said:

“It’s not just the number of friends you have, and it’s not whether or not you are in a committed relationship, but it’s the quality of your close relationships that matters. It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health. High conflict marriages, for example, without much affection, turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting divorced. And living in the midst of good warm relationships is protective.”

Having left a two-decade, high-conflict marriage—and currently bathed in the warmth of a loving, committed relationship—I can absolutely attest to the truth of Waldinger’s statement. Divorce, while no picnic, was 100% preferable to staying in a bad marriage. No longer do I wake up in a cold sweat, wracked with daily anxiety. No longer does my heart race at every domestic interaction. No longer do I feel daily resentment, anger, fear, depression, or hopelessness. No longer do I dread getting into my own bed at night. No longer does it seem, both to me and to my friends, as if I live under a dark cloud that seems to follow me wherever I go.

In fact, as crazy as it sounds—particularly to my own once-cynical ears—every morning, I wake up happy and grateful for my life. And every night, I turn to my love and thank him for the same.

Now, here’s the caveat, for women, to Waldinger’s claim: Until recently, the Harvard study—like most studies pre-1993, when the NIH enacted the Revitalization Act—only studied men.