1. Importance of a Happy Relationship

Good relationships keep us happier and healthier! This is what a major study has found.

The study has been conducted in the Harvard University on Adult development, which may be the longest study of adult life that has ever been done. It started in 1938. For 79 years, they have tracked the lives of over 700 men, year after year, asking about their work, their home lives, their health, and of course, asking all along the way without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out. Some of them started in the study when they were sophomores at Harvard College. They all finished college during World War II, and then most went off to serve in the war. The others was a group of boys from Boston's poorest and disadvantaged families in the Boston of the 1930s.

They share with the world three big lessons they have learned from this study about relationships.

1. The first is that social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected. And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.

2. The second big lesson is that it is not just the number of friends you have, and it is not whether or not you are in a committed relationship, but it is the quality of your close relationships that matters. It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health. High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection, turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting divorced. And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective.The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old.

3. And the third big lesson is that good relationships don't just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. It turns out that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your 80s is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need, those people's memories stay sharper and longer. And the people in relationships where they feel they really can't count on the other one, those are the people who experience earlier memory decline.

These are enough reasons for us to create and maintain good relationships in our life.

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