What makes a good life? A Bryn Mawr psychologist explores the role of relationships in happiness and health.

The most consistent determinants of happiness, health, and longevity? Human relationships, according to Marc Schulz, a Bryn Mawr College professor and psychologist.

In his recently published book — aptly titled The Good Life — Schulz and co-author Robert Waldinger unpack what they learned as the associate director and director, respectively, of the Harvard Study, the longest running study of happiness. The study recorded a lifetime of experiences from hundreds of inner-city Boston boys and a cohort of young men at Harvard University starting in 1938, and is still going, through more than 1,000 of their descendants.

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Yet working from home, social media, and living in a society where people often move away from family for work can all stand in the way of connecting with others, said Schulz, of Lower Merion.

He recently spoke with The Inquirer about his book in a Zoom interview edited for brevity and clarity.

The incredible ways that relationships actually get into our bodies, under our skin, and affect our health and even our brains, that’s just incredible to me.

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. Am I kind of doomed?’ And I think the lessons and the benefits of studying people for 85 years is that we find lots of change.

In our own research, the kind of tantalizing finding is that people who are in these kind of magical, intimate relationships in late life that involve trust and comfort — what we call a secure attachment — the women in those relationships show better brain health three years later, which is an indication that their cognitive functioning is being preserved, even as they age well into their 80s.

So there’s other research out there that supports this idea that relationships are cognitively difficult and challenging and exercising those muscles allows us perhaps to preserve our cognitive capacity.

When you look carefully at the studies that have been done, the gender differences are very rare. And when they’re present, they’re very small. Everyone wants intimacy. That’s what people desire.

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.

The benefit of working with a study that’s 85 years long is we can look at when telephones got introduced into people’s lives and when television started to push people out of their living rooms, and it felt very intrusive. So technologies come along all the time. It’s evolved very quickly this time. It’s definitely a mix of some positive things and some potential pitfalls.

The real challenge that I think is an interesting one, and this is where a lot of current research, including our own research, is thinking about what it means to conduct a conversation with someone that you care about over technologically mediated means versus in person in real time.

So if we go from texts on the one hand to Zoom on the other end ...

You’re nodding as I’m talking, right? That’s a lovely cue for me that you’re listening and trying to absorb it. But I can only see one sixth of your body at best, right? So you could be nodding at the same time doing this [giving a middle finger] to me.

On Zoom, those social cues are dampened.

People learn to depend on these technologically mediated forms of communication for difficult conversations. Eventually, you’re gonna be faced with a real person, right next to you in real time, who you’re having a disagreement with, and their strong feelings.

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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. So we may have familial responsibilities that make it harder for us to do in-person work activities, but it doesn’t come without a cost. The cost is that people feel more isolated.

That informal time before meetings, when people are gathered, or after meetings when people are walking out, those lead to conversations. We don’t have the time at the water cooler. So we need to be creative if people are going to work remotely, or we’re going to do some hybrid work.

I take that lesson to be to really engage fully.

Lean into the whole thing, the whole catastrophe, wife, children, challenges, right? We only have one life, and it’s gonna challenge us at different points.

If we want to lean into relationships we are also going to experience sadness and sorrow. So I think we need to lean in and accept it, and live so we can get the advantages that come with it.