Aging and Relationships:
Healthy and Happy Beyond 50

Aging and relationships appear to go hand in hand when it comes to how healthy and happy we are as we move beyond 50.


In an effort to figure out what it takes to live a long, happy life, the Study of Adult Behavior at the Harvard Medical School has used the findings of three longitudinal studies ( that is, studies that follow the same individuals over time, in this case over the course of their lives starting around age 18 in 1939. ) They were looking at whole lives and not aging and relationships as such. That just came out in the analysis.

The information that they collected points to some specific behaviors that the participants who were the happiest most healthy over 50 and on into their 80's had in common. Whether the same factors will apply to your life, my life, or that of any other individual or not is, of course not for sure, but their findings offer some logical guidelines.

Depending on your circumstances, the news is either good or bad that neither genetics nor affluence seems to be as important as what the individuals did with what they had.

For the participants in these studies, if they made it to 70, from that point on, irrespective of such issues as gender, social class, education, and intelligence, what mattered most in being healthy was specific behaviors, attitudes, and social skills.


The list of physical behaviors reported by those participants with better health from 50 on contains few, if any, surprises except perhaps for its brevity. It is:
-- Not Smoking

-- Using little alcohol

-- Exercising regularly

-- Maintaining normal weight.



And that's it!

The only two other factors on the list were:

-- maintaining strong social relationships (e.g. stable marriage,) and

-- good adjustment or mature coping styles, which the authors described as skill at "making lemonade out of lemons".


Those two factors, while perhaps quite adequate for the purposes of the statistical analyses and reports of the study, look like they could use some "fleshing out" and generalizing to make them more useful for our purposes here. That is much of what the other parts of this website are about.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a correlation was found between healthy, happy aging and relationships that were lasting.

So many things go into having good relationships, both what we bring to them and what we receive from them. Now the question is how to maintain, build, or repair our relationships as we go forward.

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