Marc Schulz, a Bryn Mawr College psychology professor, authored last year The Good Life, an exploration of what a longitudinal study that's been running since 1938 can tell people about the role relationships play in happiness, health, and longevity.The most consistent determinants of happiness, health, and longevity? Human relationships, according to Schulz and his co-author Robert Waldinger, the study’s director.
We’re really beginning to figure it out, how relationship experiences affect our immune functioning and affect our inflammatory levels and affect how genes — important genes that regulate other systems like immunology and inflammation — how they get turned on and off by relationship experiences and stresses.We often get people coming up to us or they’ll be brave enough to ask the question, ‘I’ve had a bad lot in life.
There’s some change that still happens in that adolescent young adult transition for boys, where they get more cautious about being intimate and open to their friends. And some of that has to do with definitions of masculinity that persist. But what I would say is that the idea that there are very distinct pathways now for men and women isn’t well supported by the literature.
If young people in particular are learning to depend on the technologies for most of their important conversations and their personal life, I worry how they’re going to do outside of those technologies when they don’t have them as the tool to communicate.For folks that have young kids or are taking care of aging parents, you are balancing different kinds of relationships.