Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

by Vaillant, George E.

  I interviewed Frost after he retired. He told me that he made sure to be out of the house all day and never “home for lunch.” When I asked how he and his wife depended on each other, he explained that his wife was “self-sufficient. She has different interests.” So had he, both recreational and relational. Besides occasionally going on trips, “we don’t get involved in what the other is doing.” He liked art, but “her interest in the symphony does not interest me.”

  There was absolutely no tenderness or care in his discussion of his wife. She, during my brief meeting with her, betrayed no interest in the Grant Study or in her husband’s fifty-year involvement in it. The way he put it later was that there was “nothing pulling our marriage apart, but we are not bound together.”

  People have intense reactions to a story like this. Like divorce, it evokes a lot of personal, and sometimes conflicted, associations. To the young and intense, it may sound like a tragic abdication of passion. To the old and tired, it may sound like a rueful reflection of all the dreams that never came true. To people living in marital war-zones, it may sound like a blessed relief. But personal reactions shouldn’t obscure the important lessons of the Frosts’ marriage.

  One is that even in a population selected for health, as the College cohort was, pleasure in close relationship is not a predictable developmental achievement. It’s not a clear correlate of one kind of childhood or another. It’s not a black-or-white, yes-or-no kind of thing, either. The capacity for intimate marriage is near kin to the capacity for close friendship, and we tested that by asking the men to describe their closest friends. Virtually all women can describe close friends—in plural—but some men don’t have any. Like musical talent, the talent for closeness exists on a continuum; there’s a lot of room between a tin ear and perfect pitch. To some extent the skills and pleasures of closeness can be practiced and learned; John Adams learned them. But not everyone will become a virtuoso. And, as Eben Frost demonstrates, not everyone wants to.

  Eben Frost mastered Eriksonian Intimacy in a way that Peter Penn and Algernon Young never did. But he had no interest in intimacy of other kinds. Godfrey Camille, in contrast, actively sought closeness; for him it was a life quest. John Adams kept trying to establish for himself a relationship in which closeness would be possible, and once he had one, he really worked at it—that was one of the adaptive aspects of his marriage. For Frost, as he made very clear, closeness was not a desideratum. And he enjoyed his life thoroughly.

  A comfortable, productive, and enduring marriage like Frost’s is no mean accomplishment, and for people without the desire for intense emotional closeness, it may be the best kind there is. It endured for fifty years without rancor or regret, and it gave its participants something closely approximating the modest levels of companionship they were looking for. If Patricia Frost complained sometimes that her husband’s preferred level of intimacy did not precisely match her own, she too, by her daughter’s report, appears to have been a person comfortable with more distance than with less.

  Still, the Frosts’ marriage makes me (and their daughters) a little sad. The capacity for emotional intimacy is not a moral virtue, and its lack is neither a sin nor a failure. But it is a blessing. A marriage like the Frosts’ reminds us of how it feels to look for closeness and not find it.

  Another provocative issue is the place of dependence in a successful marriage. Dependence is a dirty word these days; codependence is an even dirtier one. But mutual dependence is still allowed, and Study data suggest that some kinds of mutual dependence count among the apparently pathological adaptations that can in fact be healing. As I said in the last chapter, the most dependent adults came from the most unhappy childhoods. We’ve already seen (in Adam Newman and Sam Lovelace, for instance) that marriage, however imperfect, is an opportunity to assuage some of the loneliness of bleak early years. It turned out that happy marriages after eighty were not associated either with warm childhoods or with mature defenses in early adulthood—that is, you don’t have to start out “all grown up” to end up solidly married.

  Even when it isn’t needed for repair, mutual dependence has its own pleasures. Study transcripts from the happily married are full of unapologetic paeans to mutual dependence. As Catherine Chipp said in one of her interviews, “It’s very strengthening to have a person that you can always turn to.” Eben Frost’s story illustrates how the growth of closeness can be thwarted by too fierce a resistance to dependence. And it’s worth noting that friendship and mutual dependence in marriage deepen late in life. There are three primary reasons for this. First, the so-called empty nest is often more of a blessing than a burden. Second, the age-related hormonal changes that “feminize” husbands and “masculinize” wives make for a more level physical and emotional playing field. Third, physical infirmities make it ever plainer to both parties that mutual dependence is an advantage rather than a weakness. The deepening of dependence in marriage appears to correspond with a period of increasing subjective happiness as marriages age. More about this in a moment.

  GOOD AND BAD MARRIAGES: SOME STATISTICAL DIFFERENCES

  Table 6.2 depicts some of the relationships between Study variables and marital outcome. Most of them are self-evident. Divorce was most common among the alcoholic and the feckless, while bad marriages tended to endure among depressed men and men with bleak childhoods. The men with intact poor marriages were significantly more likely to have been depressed and to have used antidepressants or tranquilizers. As the lives of Newman and Adams suggest, while unhappy childhoods may lead to many ills in adult life, they do not preclude creating (or lucking into) a marriage good enough to help heal past miseries.

  MARRIAGE AND SEX

  There is one conspicuous missing piece in the Grant Study data set, and that is the sexual behavior of the Grant Study men as adults. We know a certain amount about the men’s sexual attitudes as sophomores, because that was a major interest of the early investigators. Over half the men expressed serious worries about masturbation to the Study psychiatrists: “It caused my acne, and other people could tell”; “I feared I would go crazy, become impotent, or damage my penis”; “Greatest problem in my life.” By modern standards, the men’s training (or lack of it) in sexual matters seemed quite repressive. We also know that in 1938 almost two-thirds of the men were strongly opposed to sexual intercourse before marriage: “I am disgusted with the idea of sexual relations”; “It is out of the question, nauseating”; “It would do something to my personality.”

  Table 6.2 Correlates of Good and Bad Marital Outcomes

  * The total N in Table 6.2 is 159 rather than the 242 in Table 6.1 due to the exclusion of the 73 so-so marriages, the 7 never married, and 3 missing data.

  Of course we were very interested in adult sexual adjustment, but it didn’t take long for the Study staff to notice that a questionnaire that delved too inquisitively into the men’s sex lives was a questionnaire with a very low return rate. Over the years, therefore, the only information we systematically gathered on this subject were responses to a simplistic and rather ritualized question: Did a man perceive his sexual adjustment as “very satisfying,” “satisfying,” “not as good as wished,” or “poor”?

  What we found was that overt fear of sex was a far more powerful predictor of poor mental health than sexual dissatisfaction in marriage was. After all, marital sexual adjustment depends heavily upon the partner, but fear of sex is closely linked with a personal mistrust of the universe. The men who experienced lifelong poor marriages were six times as likely as men with excellent marriages, and twice as likely as men who divorced, to give evidence on questionnaires of being fearful or uncomfortable about sexual relations. Yet there were many good marriages in which sexual adjustment was less than ideal after the couple reached age sixty. We can’t yet say much about why, or about what role biology may play.

  Apart from that I don’t have much of interest to report on the men’s sex lives, except for one oddity of exactly the sort t
hat makes lifetime studies so unpredictable and so fascinating.

  At age eighty-five, we asked the men when they had last engaged in sexual intercourse. Only sixty-two (about two-thirds) of the men responded; of those 30 percent were still sexually active. In that small sample, the predictors of sustained sexual activity were: good health at sixty and seventy, good overall adjustment after (but not necessarily before) age sixty-five, and an absence of vascular risk factors. Surprisingly, the variables I thought would protect against early impotence—ancestral longevity, maturity of defenses, physical health at age eighty, and quality of marriage—showed no significant effect.

  But I empirically defined a composite variable called cultural and impractical, summing five “touchy-feely” traits that had not been considered promising back in 1938—Creative/intuitive, Cultural, Ideational, Introspective, and Sensitive affect—and then subtracting from them the two practical traits that had largely been seen as laudable—Pragmatic and Practical/organizing. I chose these items because they correlated at least weakly with prolonged sexual activity. The result was not only very significantly correlated with a long sex life, but it also allowed a startling and dramatic separation of the Grant Study men by politics (more on this in Chapter 10, and on the curious association of the men’s political beliefs with sustained sexual activity).

  DIVORCE REVISITED

  Thirty-five years ago I was largely wrong about the importance of divorce. It is clear to me now that divorce does not necessarily reflect an inability to achieve Eriksonian Intimacy or even to enjoy great relational closeness. Divorce is often a symptom of something else. Ultimately, a man’s ability to cherish his parents, his siblings, his children, his friends, and at least one partner proved a far better predictor of his mental health and generativity than a mistaken early choice in his search for love.

  There is unequivocal evidence that divorce occurs more frequently among people with every kind of mental illness.12 But divorce does not imply mental illness. On the contrary, when a marriage is chronically unhappy, only divorce allows for the possibility of a new and better one. Most of us carry on an internal debate when a friend is considering ending a marriage. Divorce raises all kinds of personal anxieties about the safety of our relationships. It violates our sense of family stability and ruptures religious vows. It rarely makes for happy children. Yet it can also be a breakout from outworn social codes, chronic spousal abuse, or simply a bad decision. So it was interesting to compare the final remarriages of the divorced men with the marriages of men who remained unhappily with their first wives. The reasons for divorce had been one of Arlie Bock’s founding questions when he first proposed the Study; he had appreciated all the way back in 1938 that it could only be answered in the context of lifetimes.

  One man who stayed in a bad marriage wrote, “This marriage will stick, if for no other reason than we’re a couple of stuffy, latter-day Victorians who just wouldn’t face divorce anyway.” Another wrote, “The marriage is stable if you will accept that it is held together as much by decision as by desire.” “Divorce is pretty unthinkable,” wrote a third, “so I grin and bear it. . . . Our marriage would have ended probably 15 years ago but for religion and the presence of children.” Religion and children were the two reasons usually cited for staying together among the enduring bad marriages.

  The characteristic adaptive styles of the two groups of men were different. The men who remained in unhappy long marriages were more likely to be passive in other aspects of their lives than those who sought divorce, and less likely to use humor as a coping mechanism than the men who made the happiest remarriages. Their mental health was less robust in that they had had significantly more recourse to psychotherapy and to mood-altering drugs in an attempt to self-medicate. They were also less likely to have had warm childhoods in their pasts, or to enjoy rich social supports in old age.

  The endurance of some bad marriages, however, seemed to involve loyalty to a depressed or alcoholic partner. Of the forty-nine men with lifelong excellent marriages, no men and only two wives abused alcohol, and only one man was mentally ill. But in forty-eight lifelong bad marriages, eleven men were alcoholic, nine had alcoholic wives, and seven were depressed. Some of these marriages endured out of codependency (as in the case of Lovelace’s first marriage), and somewhere one of the spouses was caretaker to the other, as in Albert Paine’s last one. And even unhappiness in marriage isn’t an all-or-nothing affair; three of these husbands reported at least one period when the marriage was excellent. Perhaps these are cases where hope died hard; as we’ve seen, the capacity to hope has a lot to be said for it.

  CONCLUSION

  So what do the seventy-five years of the Grant Study have to teach us about marriage, intimacy, and mental health? For one thing, they make clear that Lewellen Howland was right—the important thing is that “loving people for a long time is good.” Why? Well, for one reason, as I said at the outset, it feels good. Most of us enjoy love when we can get it. But in developmental terms, both intimacy and positive mental health reflect the process of replacing narcissism with empathy, a progressive amalgam of love and social intelligence that is essential to the development of mature defense mechanisms and optimum adaptational skills (Chapter 8).

  The Study also makes abundantly clear that people don’t drink because they’re in bad marriages, but that drink makes marriages bad. For twenty-eight men, happy marriages became unhappy following the onset of alcoholism in a partner; in only seven cases did alcoholism first become obvious following a failing marriage, and in some of them the “failing marriage” was clearly less a cause than a rationalization for the loss of control over alcohol. Popular belief notwithstanding, alcohol is a very bad tranquilizer.

  Third, we learn something about why the percentage of happy marriages increases after seventy. It is known from studies of the general population that the divorce rate declines sharply with increasing age and length of marriage.13 Explanations for this include the selective weeding out over time of vulnerable marriages, increasing commitment and resistance to change with increasing age, and perhaps the fact that greater joint assets make divorce more expensive. A decline in divorce rate is not necessarily the same thing as increased marital happiness, but increased happiness is what our data showed. During the period from age twenty to seventy, only 18 percent of both partners from the entire sample reported their marriages as happy for at least twenty years. By age seventy-five half of the surviving men did. And by eighty-five, the proportion of happy marriages had risen to 76 percent. Some of this improvement no doubt has to do with Laura Carstensen’s theory of socioemotional selectivity, which suggests that as people get older they tend to remember the good over the bad.14 Some seems to relate to the men’s increased tolerance for mutual dependence as they aged; as George Bancroft said, contemplating the loss of his once-cherished driver’s license, “You let your wife learn about you. . . .” Certainly the more the men became able to appreciate shared dependence as an opportunity rather than a threat, the more positive feelings they expressed about their marriages. Successful remarriage after divorce or widowhood was another contributing factor.

  But the Grant Study offers an unexpected finding that even first marriages improve late in life. This is something that we would have been very unlikely to discover from a shorter or less comprehensive study. After age seventy, the men just seemed to find their marriages more precious. “Jane and I are at the age where what life we have left together is like the last few days of a great vacation,” one seventy-eight-year-old Study member said. “You want to get the most out of them, so we want to get the most out of our togetherness.”

  Finally, the Study illuminates some subtle but vital distinctions that can’t be perceived at all except through the long lens of lifetime study: the difference between facile optimism like Alfred Paine’s (see Chapter 7), for example, and the lifelong faith in the universe of a Boatwright or an Adams. One is mere glitter; the other is true gold. Codependency may
be a very false friend, but it was the capacity for mutual dependency that allowed the Chipps to share a warmth and comfort that the competent but chilly Frosts couldn’t offer each other.

  And the lives of men like John Adams and the others who turned my thinking about marriage upside down remind us again of the remarkable reality that people continue to change, and people continue to grow. An interviewer once asked Margaret Mead to what she attributed the failure of her three marriages. “I don’t know what you mean,” she answered. “I had three successful marriages, all for different developmental phases of my life.”15

  7

  LIVING TO NINETY

  It is a popular belief, but a fallacy, that we can learn about what contributes to extreme old age by studying very old survivors. This certainly needs to be done, but it is also necessary to know about the characteristics of other members of their birth cohort, in early childhood, adulthood and early old age.

  —M. BURY AND A. HOLME, Life after Ninety

  IN MY PREOCCUPATION with love, joy, and relationship in old age, I tend to forget the more mundane but absolutely crucial importance of staying alive. Physical health is just as important to successful aging as social and emotional health. In 2011, the Grant Study and the Lothian Birth Cohort 1921 became, as far as I know, the world’s first prospective studies of the physical health of nonagenarians.1 (The Lothian Birth Cohort was formed in Edinburgh in 1932. It included more than 80,000 eleven-year-olds, many of whom have been followed over the years to the age of ninety.)

  In this chapter I will focus on the sixty-eight surviving members of the Grant Study who are still active as of March 2012, but I will also review what happened to the men who died along the way. This exploration will take me through several important revisions of the received wisdom of earlier years, including some once convincingly backed up by hard data. There were surprises involved, and some shocks, too, for argument and theory can never be enough. We need documentation and proof. In the study of lifetimes this means prolonged follow-up and systematic retesting of serious hypotheses—not over a year or two, but over decades. That’s the very first and most fundamental lesson of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and the one on which all the other lessons depend: While life continues, so does development. The study of very old age is the ultimate case in point.