Relationships & Happiness
Strong personal connections are a key factor to living a happy life. In 2002, Ed Diener and Martin Seligman from the University of Illinois conducted a study where they surveyed their students on a happiness index. They looked at the 10% of students who demonstrated the highest degrees of happiness and found the most significant indicator of happiness was, “their strong ties to friends and family and commitment to spending time with them.” Similarly, psychologist Chris Peterson, a professor at the University of Michigan, says the best piece of advice to come out of his research is that “good relationships are buffers against the damaging effects of all of life’s inevitable letdowns and setbacks.”
Robert Waldinger, a Harvard University psychiatrist, conducted a 75-year multigenerational study examining the lives of students at Harvard together with people in some of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods in order to better understand the causes of health and happiness. Waldinger found that the quality of relationships a person had was directly tied to their level of happiness. Lonely people were less happy and had poorer health while people with higher-quality social ties consistently ranked happier. The study went on to conclude that it wasn’t just having social relationships that made people happier, but having one stable and consistently caring person in their lives that made the difference. Having lots of acquaintances or being in a relationship with an unreliable or unstable partner did not make people happier.
