Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (29 page)

When he was forty-seven, I ranked Frost among the top third in the Study in adjustment; later, in the Decathlon, he scored in the top tenth. According to him, his life was as smooth as silk. “My practice doesn’t have pressure; I chose a career without tensions.” And he added with his characteristic lordly sang-froid, “I am the most unpressured person that exists.”

Once in a midlife assessment, Frost complained that he was unsatisfied in his law career, and was “doomed to frustration.” He expressed a wish to have been a creative artist. But as always, he knew how to comfort himself in his frustration, and he knew how to take care of himself, too. He designed his own house. He became president of his suburban PTA. And by the time six years had passed, he had altered his professional life to give him the personal, caring contact that he craved. He was now responsible for training young associates and could say to me with the enthusiasm of the generative, “My job turns me on.”

But for all his repeated assertions that he was “as easy to get along with as anyone who ever lived,” things weren’t quite so silky at home. He reported that his wife “engaged in a certain amount of nagging.” When they went on vacation, she spent her time on the beach while he played golf. He understood very well that his avoidance of mutual dependency was a loss to both of them, and that the greatest stress in his marriage was “her frustration over my unwillingness to let her get inside of me.” He himself didn’t crave that kind of connection, though. He knew that she sometimes felt shut out, but his view was that she
let
her problems “grow and grow unnecessarily.” He didn’t take kindly to weakness. He said of himself that “[m]y greatest weakness is not leaning on anybody.” Insight was always one of his strong suits, but it didn’t change him. In contrast, here’s Fredrick Chipp at the same age, responding to a question about what he did when he was upset about something. “I go to her,” he said of his wife. “I talk with her. It’s very natural and easy and helpful. I certainly don’t keep it to myself. She’s my confidant.”

One of Frost’s daughters wrote that in her parents’ years together, she had never seen them fight; equally revealing, she had never seen them affectionate. He had always been more loving with his grandchildren than with his own children, she said. His other daughter summed up the situation: “Frosts never say ‘I love you’ to their children.” But people who can’t hug their peers can hug puppies. And grandkids.

I interviewed Frost after he retired. He told me that he made sure to be out of the house all day and never “home for lunch.” When I asked how he and his wife depended on each other, he explained that his wife was “self-sufficient. She has different interests.” So had he, both recreational and relational. Besides occasionally going on trips, “we don’t get involved in what the other is doing.” He liked art, but “her interest in the symphony does not interest me.”

There was absolutely no tenderness or care in his discussion of his wife. She, during my brief meeting with her, betrayed no interest in the Grant Study or in her husband’s fifty-year involvement in it. The way he put it later was that there was “nothing pulling our marriage apart, but we are not bound together.”

People have intense reactions to a story like this. Like divorce, it evokes a lot of personal, and sometimes conflicted, associations. To the young and intense, it may sound like a tragic abdication of passion. To the old
and
tired, it may sound like a rueful reflection of all the dreams that never came true. To people living in marital war-zones, it may sound like a blessed relief. But personal reactions shouldn’t obscure the important lessons of the Frosts’ marriage.

One is that even in a population selected for health, as the College cohort was, pleasure in close relationship is not a predictable developmental achievement. It’s not a clear correlate of one kind of childhood or another. It’s not a black-or-white, yes-or-no kind of thing, either. The capacity for intimate marriage is near kin to the capacity for close friendship, and we tested that by asking the men to describe their closest friends. Virtually all women can describe close friends—in plural—but some men don’t have any. Like musical talent, the talent for closeness exists on a continuum; there’s a lot of room between a tin ear and perfect pitch. To some extent the skills and pleasures of closeness can be practiced and learned; John Adams learned them. But not everyone will become a virtuoso. And, as Eben Frost demonstrates, not everyone wants to.

Eben Frost mastered Eriksonian Intimacy in a way that Peter Penn and Algernon Young never did. But he had no interest in intimacy of other kinds. Godfrey Camille, in contrast, actively sought closeness; for him it was a life quest. John Adams kept trying to establish for himself a relationship in which closeness would be possible, and once he had one, he really worked at it—that was one of the adaptive aspects of his marriage. For Frost, as he made very clear, closeness was not a desideratum. And he enjoyed his life thoroughly.

A comfortable, productive, and enduring marriage like Frost’s is no mean accomplishment, and for people without the desire for intense emotional closeness, it may be the best kind there is. It endured for fifty years without rancor or regret, and it gave its participants something closely approximating the modest levels of companionship they were looking for. If Patricia Frost complained sometimes that her
husband’s
preferred level of intimacy did not precisely match her own, she too, by her daughter’s report, appears to have been a person comfortable with more distance than with less.

Still, the Frosts’ marriage makes me (and their daughters) a little sad. The capacity for emotional intimacy is not a moral virtue, and its lack is neither a sin nor a failure. But it is a blessing. A marriage like the Frosts’ reminds us of how it feels to look for closeness and not find it.

Another provocative issue is the place of dependence in a successful marriage. Dependence is a dirty word these days; codependence is an even dirtier one. But
mutual
dependence is still allowed, and Study data suggest that some kinds of mutual dependence count among the apparently pathological adaptations that can in fact be healing. As I said in the last chapter, the most dependent adults came from the most unhappy childhoods. We’ve already seen (in Adam Newman and Sam Lovelace, for instance) that marriage, however imperfect, is an opportunity to assuage some of the loneliness of bleak early years. It turned out that happy marriages after eighty were not associated either with warm childhoods or with mature defenses in early adulthood—that is, you don’t have to start out “all grown up” to end up solidly married.

Even when it isn’t needed for repair, mutual dependence has its own pleasures. Study transcripts from the happily married are full of unapologetic paeans to mutual dependence. As Catherine Chipp said in one of her interviews, “It’s very strengthening to have a person that you can always turn to.” Eben Frost’s story illustrates how the growth of closeness can be thwarted by too fierce a resistance to dependence. And it’s worth noting that friendship and mutual dependence in marriage deepen late in life. There are three primary reasons for this. First, the so-called empty nest is often more of a blessing than a burden.
Second,
the age-related hormonal changes that “feminize” husbands and “masculinize” wives make for a more level physical and emotional playing field. Third, physical infirmities make it ever plainer to both parties that mutual dependence is an advantage rather than a weakness. The deepening of dependence in marriage appears to correspond with a period of increasing subjective happiness as marriages age. More about this in a moment.

GOOD AND BAD MARRIAGES: SOME STATISTICAL DIFFERENCES

Table 6.2
depicts some of the relationships between Study variables and marital outcome. Most of them are self-evident. Divorce was most common among the alcoholic and the feckless, while bad marriages tended to endure among depressed men and men with bleak childhoods. The men with intact poor marriages were significantly more likely to have been depressed and to have used antidepressants or tranquilizers. As the lives of Newman and Adams suggest, while unhappy childhoods may lead to many ills in adult life, they do not preclude creating (or lucking into) a marriage good enough to help heal past miseries.

MARRIAGE AND SEX

There is one conspicuous missing piece in the Grant Study data set, and that is the sexual behavior of the Grant Study men as adults. We know a certain amount about the men’s sexual attitudes as sophomores, because that was a major interest of the early investigators. Over half the men expressed serious worries about masturbation to the Study psychiatrists: “It caused my acne, and other people could tell”; “I feared I would go crazy, become impotent, or damage my penis”; “Greatest problem in my life.” By modern standards, the men’s training (or lack of it) in sexual matters seemed quite repressive. We
also
know that in 1938 almost two-thirds of the men were strongly opposed to sexual intercourse before marriage: “I am disgusted with the idea of sexual relations”; “It is out of the question, nauseating”; “It would do something to my personality.”

Table
6.2
Correlates of Good and Bad Marital Outcomes

*
The total N in
Table 6.2
is 159 rather than the 242 in
Table 6.1
due to the exclusion of the 73 so-so marriages, the 7 never married, and 3 missing data.

Of course we were very interested in adult sexual adjustment, but it didn’t take long for the Study staff to notice that a questionnaire that delved too inquisitively into the men’s sex lives was a questionnaire with a very low return rate. Over the years, therefore, the only information we systematically gathered on this subject were responses to a simplistic and rather ritualized question: Did a man perceive his sexual adjustment as “very satisfying,” “satisfying,” “not as good as wished,” or “poor”?

What we found was that overt fear of sex was a far more powerful predictor of poor mental health than sexual dissatisfaction in marriage was. After all, marital sexual adjustment depends heavily upon the partner, but fear of sex is closely linked with a personal mistrust of the universe. The men who experienced lifelong poor marriages were six times as likely as men with excellent marriages, and twice as likely as men who divorced, to give evidence on questionnaires of being fearful or uncomfortable about sexual relations. Yet there were many good marriages in which sexual adjustment was less than ideal after the couple reached age sixty. We can’t yet say much about why, or about what role biology may play.

Apart from that I don’t have much of interest to report on the men’s sex lives, except for one oddity of exactly the sort that makes lifetime studies so unpredictable and so fascinating.

At age eighty-five, we asked the men when they had last engaged in sexual intercourse. Only sixty-two (about two-thirds) of the men responded; of those 30 percent were still sexually active. In that small sample, the predictors of sustained sexual activity were: good health at sixty and seventy, good overall adjustment after (but not necessarily
before)
age sixty-five, and an absence of vascular risk factors. Surprisingly, the variables I thought would protect against early impotence—ancestral longevity, maturity of defenses, physical health at age eighty, and quality of marriage—showed no significant effect.

But I empirically defined a composite variable called
cultural and impractical,
summing five “touchy-feely” traits that had not been considered promising back in 1938—
Creative/intuitive, Cultural, Ideational, Introspective,
and
Sensitive affect
—and then subtracting from them the two practical traits that had largely been seen as laudable—
Pragmatic
and
Practical/organizing.
I chose these items because they correlated at least weakly with prolonged sexual activity. The result was not only very significantly correlated with a long sex life, but it also allowed a startling and dramatic separation of the Grant Study men by politics (more on this in
Chapter 10
, and on the curious association of the men’s political beliefs with sustained sexual activity).

DIVORCE REVISITED

Thirty-five years ago I was largely wrong about the importance of divorce. It is clear to me now that divorce does not necessarily reflect an inability to achieve Eriksonian Intimacy or even to enjoy great relational closeness. Divorce is often a symptom of something else. Ultimately, a man’s ability to cherish his parents, his siblings, his children, his friends, and at least one partner proved a far better predictor of his mental health and generativity than a mistaken early choice in his search for love.

There is unequivocal evidence that divorce occurs more frequently among people with every kind of mental illness.
12
But divorce does not imply mental illness. On the contrary, when a marriage is chronically unhappy, only divorce allows for the possibility of a new and better one. Most of us carry on an internal debate when a friend
is
considering ending a marriage. Divorce raises all kinds of personal anxieties about the safety of our relationships. It violates our sense of family stability and ruptures religious vows. It rarely makes for happy children. Yet it can also be a breakout from outworn social codes, chronic spousal abuse, or simply a bad decision. So it was interesting to compare the final remarriages of the divorced men with the marriages of men who remained unhappily with their first wives. The reasons for divorce had been one of Arlie Bock’s founding questions when he first proposed the Study; he had appreciated all the way back in 1938 that it could only be answered in the context of lifetimes.