In my last reflection I commented on David Brooks’ recent review (5/14) of Josua Wolf Shenk’s essay “What Makes Us Happy,” found in the current issue (June 2009) of the Atlantic. Brooks says that the researcher, George Vaillant, discovered through his longitudinal study of the lives of Harvard men that “the only thing that really matters in life are (sic) your relationships to other people.” Brooks muses about Vaillant’s life, a life lacking in warm relationship and intimacy, and concludes, “Even when we know something, it is hard to make it so.”
I just read Shenk’s article and found it fascinating. It was one of those on which I used a magic marker copiously. Shenk gives summaries of various case studies throughout the article, and he also from time to time reports interesting conclusions which Vaillant came to during his intensive study. A few of these are the following:
“. . . a glimpse of any one moment in a life can be deeply misleading. A man at 20 who appears the model of altruism may turn out to be a kind of emotional prodigy–or he may be ducking . . . <a> kind of engagement with reality. . . ; on the other extreme, a man at 20 who appears impossibly wounded may turn out to be gestating toward maturity.”
“. . . mature adaptations are a real-life alchemy, a way of turning the dross of emotional crises, pain, and deprivation into the gold of human connection, accomplishment, and creativity.”
He sites the seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically: employing mature adaptations, education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight.
But at no place was Vaillant more powerful and articulate, says Shenk, than when he describes the significance of love and intimacy in our lives. Vaillant was asked in an interview in March 2008, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant responded: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
Perhaps Vaillant was so keenly aware of the importance of relationship because his life has always been fraught with such difficulty in that arena. So how is it that someone can know so much and yet find it so difficult to put into practice what he clearly understands? Vaillant answers this question in a profound and moving statement in his book Adaptation to Life. Speaking of his male subjects not from a scientific, but more from a philosophical or even theological perspective, he writes: “Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.”
So yes, the process of learning to be fully human, the process of learning to love openly and deeply, is in the final analysis, a mystery. We don’t understand why we do what we do, or why we fail sometimes to become what we most earnestly desire to become.
However, in my last reflection I did promise you an answer, and an answer I will give. Love is the most powerful force that exists, and love can be taught. It is best taught in the first 18 months of a child’s life, and if a child is separated from mother during those years for any reason, or if a child is abused, or if a child is with parents who cannot for whatever reason nurture the child, then learning love later in life will prove difficult. But except in the most profound cases of deprivation, it will not prove impossible.
People who need to learn about love can do so by being with people who know how to love, in community and in intimate places in their lives. Often helpers are needed–skilled psychotherapists for sure, spiritual advisors, massage therapists, yoga teachers, etc., etc. A loving community is essential. In the best of all worlds, the love-deprived person will be able at some point to enter into a long-term, intimate relationship with someone who is good at loving and who will love the person exactly as he or she is.
Is there any guarantee? In this world, there never is. We just don’t know. But we can do our best to increase the odds. We can love, and we can reach out for love. In the end, we’ll find that Vaillant is right–it’s all that matters.
