Love Is (Almost) All You Need

However, despite the limited role women play in the study, Vaillant says he found the same factors in both genders led to a successful old age. He says the thing that was the biggest surprise to him was that a good marriage or long-term relationship at the age of 50 is a leading indicator of aging well at 80, while low cholesterol levels at age 50 are not. In fact, the quantity of loving marriages portrayed in the book can leave the reader with a raised eyebrow. But Vaillant says this is representative of the relationships he encountered in the study subjects. "There were some horrible ones, so it wasn't that I was deaf, dumb and blind," he says, "but the number of marriages at 70 and 80 where there was this real enjoyment between the husband and wife, I did not expect to find."

The importance of a good marriage to aging well was so strong that Vaillant is now working on a grant proposal to examine the marriages of the study participants in greater detail. (Vaillant himself has been married twice; following the end of his first marriage, he "happily remarried" in 1971 and has five children, ages 24 to 43.) "When you have a lousy childhood, which can predict trouble in early adulthood, the biggest change that allows a quantum leap from disaster to mastery comes from marriage," he says. "That's the simplest key to aging well."

Of course, Vaillant has some theories as to why that is so. "If you think about what leads to a good roommate interaction, it's got to do with your comfort with cooperation," he says. "It's this very delicate balancing act of being intimate without losing your boundaries. You're attached at the hip, but you also let each other lead separate lives. That really takes a lot of balancing. It's like you've got cheddar cheese and apple pie-they go together well, but no one thought they would. That kind of creative synergy is terribly important."

And it's not just a sound marriage that can lead to aging well, Vaillant discovered. Love in all its guises plays a major role, but having loving parents is not essential, he says. It may have taken a long time, but by age 75, he notes, study participants with bleak childhoods were generally able to overcome them and fared no worse in terms of health or income than their compatriots with happy childhoods. "Like money, it doesn't do any harm to have a good childhood, but some people manage to find other ingenious solutions," he says. "Having someone love you isn't as important as what are you going to do with it. It isn't feeling an inner joy and peace; it's the ability to take people in."

Higher Education a High Priority

Other surprises dealt by the Harvard Study include, prominent on the list, the importance of higher education, which was more clearly underscored by the inclusion of the inner-city population, who generally came from poor and uneducated backgrounds. And, with apologies to all you Ivy Leaguers out there, it really doesn't matter what school you attend, Vaillant found. Just attending college means an individual has a greater chance of aging successfully than someone who does not. "For five years the data has been pointing to the importance of education over social class and money and even intelligence as the critical variable," Vaillant declares. "And for six years I've been trying to figure out why that is. I've never been satisfied with my answers. Just yesterday I had a bright audience of social scientists, and I knew they were going to ask me that question. So instead of trying to answer it, I told them, 'I'm going to ask you this question at the end.' After hearing their thoughts, I decided theirs were the best answers I've gotten so far-that education contributes to better self-care, perseverance, information-acquiring skills, as well as increased income. So it's a question of sitting down with you and four of your more thoughtful friends and having a bull session. You'll learn more than listening to me."

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