Love Analyzed

Welcome back to the blog everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. Today we're talking about love, the eternal subject, but from a more analytical, research-based perspective. Most people would say, and I agree, that love is the most important thing there is, but we find it difficult to agree on what exactly love means, or what it means to embody it.

I want to start with the Harvard Grant study. You've probably heard me talk about this before, but today I want to go a little further into the weeds. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, the Harvard Grant study is a long-term longitudinal study of adult human development that began in 1938 and is still ongoing today. It's the most ambitious and probably the most influential study on the human condition ever conducted, following over 200 undergraduate Harvard men throughout their lives, with regular interviews, medical and brain exams, psychological assessments, and more. All with the goal of discovering the causes and restrictors of human flourishing.

George Vaillant, who led the study for many years, famously summarized its findings in five words: "Happiness is love. Full stop." Powerful validation for our intuitive notion that love is the most important part of our lives. That phrase, "full stop," essentially means that "happiness is love" is the whole takeaway. You could stop there. Today however, we are going to disregard George's advice and dig a little deeper.

For example, what exactly did he mean by love? Love is an abstract concept that different people may define very differently, but a study needs quantifiable metrics. Getting a bit more specific, the study found that the ability to form close relationships was the strongest predictor of long-term health and happiness. Stronger than intelligence. Stronger than wealth. Stronger than career success. Stronger than upbringing. Notice I said that close relationships predict health as well as happiness. In fact--and this is shocking--the Grant study along with numerous others have consistently found that loneliness is a health risk factor comparable to smoking, alcoholism, or obesity.

Now, this raises an obvious question which is not directly answered by the study (at least to my knowledge): if the ability to form close relationships is the key to happiness, then what determines that ability? Forming relationships is a complex task, so it is probably too much to hope for a single-factor answer. But we can make some reasonable assumptions. And since it is a task, and not a fact of our biology or background, it should be learnable regardless of where we are in life--an encouraging thought.

There's one aspect I want to especially look at: commitment. When you see that word, you probably think of wedding vows, but all meaningful relationships are reliant on some level of trust and commitment. Studies have suggested that one of the reasons we have such an epidemic of loneliness today is that the push for autonomy in the first world has diminished many of the institutions that once served as commitments in our lives: marriages, churches, neighborhood communities, etc. Many of us celebrated the idea of escaping obligations and becoming more independent, but it turns out that when those social networks get left behind, individuals don't typically construct replacements. In a practical sense, it may be that obligation is a necessary instrument of connection and community, as much as we try to avoid it.

So what does that mean for us today? The more options we have, the more we tend to be paralyzed by the breadth of choices available. When you have a whole world of potential friends or romantic companions at your fingertips, it's ironically more difficult to invest in any of them, because a better one might be just around the corner, and because everyone else is treating relationships as fungible too. I think there's a lot to be said for making a conscious effort to resist this, for intentionally attaching less value to your time in the sense of hoarding it for yourself and spending it on others only sparingly. You hear people talk a lot about the importance of learning to say "no," and not letting people make too many demands on your time--and there's a place for that. But the idea that C.S. Lewis verbalized in The Screwtape Letters, that you start each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours, and the needs of your relationships are a tax on this privately-owned sum, has problems of its own.

After all, real meaning and fulfillment in life is rarely found outside of relationships--I would say that the most fulfilling parts of life are never found outside them at all. And yet this impulse to protect "my time" can be quite strong. I think a good way to properly contextualize it is to ask yourself what you're aspiring to with all this time you're storing up for yourself. If the answer has anything to do with happiness and fulfillment, then that time must surely be in service to relationships, not the other way around.