Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (30 page)

One man who stayed in a bad marriage wrote, “This marriage will stick, if for no other reason than we’re a couple of stuffy, latter-day Victorians who just wouldn’t face divorce anyway.” Another wrote, “The marriage is stable if you will accept that it is held together as much by decision as by desire.” “Divorce is pretty unthinkable,” wrote a third, “so I grin and bear it. . . . Our marriage would have ended probably 15 years ago but for religion and the presence of children.” Religion and children were the two reasons usually cited for staying together among the enduring bad marriages.

The characteristic adaptive styles of the two groups of men were different. The men who remained in unhappy long marriages were more likely to be passive in other aspects of their lives than those who sought divorce, and less likely to use humor as a coping mechanism than the men who made the happiest remarriages. Their mental health was less robust in that they had had significantly more recourse to psychotherapy and to mood-altering drugs in an attempt to self-medicate. They were also less likely to have had warm childhoods in their pasts, or to enjoy rich social supports in old age.

The endurance of some bad marriages, however, seemed to involve loyalty to a depressed or alcoholic partner. Of the forty-nine men with lifelong excellent marriages, no men and only two wives
abused
alcohol, and only one man was mentally ill. But in forty-eight lifelong bad marriages, eleven men were alcoholic, nine had alcoholic wives, and seven were depressed. Some of these marriages endured out of codependency (as in the case of Lovelace’s first marriage), and somewhere one of the spouses was caretaker to the other, as in Albert Paine’s last one. And even unhappiness in marriage isn’t an all-or-nothing affair; three of these husbands reported at least one period when the marriage was excellent. Perhaps these are cases where hope died hard; as we’ve seen, the capacity to hope has a lot to be said for it.

CONCLUSION

So what do the seventy-five years of the Grant Study have to teach us about marriage, intimacy, and mental health? For one thing, they make clear that Lewellen Howland was right—the important thing is that “loving people for a long time is good.” Why? Well, for one reason, as I said at the outset, it feels good. Most of us enjoy love when we can get it. But in developmental terms, both intimacy and positive mental health reflect the process of replacing narcissism with empathy, a progressive amalgam of love and social intelligence that is essential to the development of mature defense mechanisms and optimum adaptational skills (
Chapter 8
).

The Study also makes abundantly clear that people don’t drink because they’re in bad marriages, but that drink makes marriages bad. For twenty-eight men, happy marriages became unhappy following the onset of alcoholism in a partner; in only seven cases did alcoholism first become obvious following a failing marriage, and in some of them the “failing marriage” was clearly less a cause than a rationalization for the loss of control over alcohol. Popular belief notwithstanding, alcohol is a very bad tranquilizer.

Third,
we learn something about why the percentage of happy marriages increases after seventy. It is known from studies of the general population that the divorce rate declines sharply with increasing age and length of marriage.
13
Explanations for this include the selective weeding out over time of vulnerable marriages, increasing commitment and resistance to change with increasing age, and perhaps the fact that greater joint assets make divorce more expensive. A decline in divorce rate is not necessarily the same thing as increased marital happiness, but increased happiness is what our data showed. During the period from age twenty to seventy, only 18 percent of both partners from the entire sample reported their marriages as happy for at least twenty years. By age seventy-five half of the surviving men did. And by eighty-five, the proportion of happy marriages had risen to 76 percent. Some of this improvement no doubt has to do with Laura Carstensen’s theory of socioemotional selectivity, which suggests that as people get older they tend to remember the good over the bad.
14
Some seems to relate to the men’s increased tolerance for mutual dependence as they aged; as George Bancroft said, contemplating the loss of his once-cherished driver’s license, “You let your wife learn about you. . . .” Certainly the more the men became able to appreciate shared dependence as an opportunity rather than a threat, the more positive feelings they expressed about their marriages. Successful remarriage after divorce or widowhood was another contributing factor.

But the Grant Study offers an unexpected finding that even first marriages improve late in life. This is something that we would have been very unlikely to discover from a shorter or less comprehensive study. After age seventy, the men just seemed to find their marriages more precious. “Jane and I are at the age where what life we have left together is like the last few days of a great vacation,” one seventy-eight-year-old
Study member said. “You want to get the most out of them, so we want to get the most out of our togetherness.”

Finally, the Study illuminates some subtle but vital distinctions that can’t be perceived at all except through the long lens of lifetime study: the difference between facile optimism like Alfred Paine’s (see
Chapter 7
), for example, and the lifelong faith in the universe of a Boatwright or an Adams. One is mere glitter; the other is true gold. Codependency may be a very false friend, but it was the capacity for
mutual
dependency that allowed the Chipps to share a warmth and comfort that the competent but chilly Frosts couldn’t offer each other.

And the lives of men like John Adams and the others who turned my thinking about marriage upside down remind us again of the remarkable reality that people continue to change, and people continue to grow. An interviewer once asked Margaret Mead to what she attributed the failure of her three marriages. “I don’t know what you mean,” she answered. “I had three successful marriages, all for different developmental phases of my life.”
15

7

LIVING TO NINETY

It is a popular belief, but a fallacy, that we can learn about what contributes to extreme old age by studying very old survivors. This certainly needs to be done, but it is also necessary to know about the characteristics of other members of their birth cohort, in early childhood, adulthood and early old age.

—M. BURY AND A. HOLME,
Life after Ninety

IN MY PREOCCUPATION
with love, joy, and relationship in old age, I tend to forget the more mundane but absolutely crucial importance of staying alive. Physical health is just as important to successful aging as social and emotional health. In 2011, the Grant Study and the Lothian Birth Cohort 1921 became, as far as I know, the world’s first prospective studies of the physical health of nonagenarians.
1
(The Lothian Birth Cohort was formed in Edinburgh in 1932. It included more than 80,000 eleven-year-olds, many of whom have been followed over the years to the age of ninety.)

In this chapter I will focus on the sixty-eight surviving members of the Grant Study who are still active as of March 2012, but I will also review what happened to the men who died along the way. This exploration will take me through several important revisions of the received wisdom of earlier years, including some once convincingly backed up by hard data. There were surprises involved, and some shocks, too, for argument and theory can never be enough. We need documentation and proof. In the study of lifetimes this means prolonged follow-up and systematic retesting of serious hypotheses—not
over
a year or two, but over decades. That’s the very first and most fundamental lesson of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and the one on which all the other lessons depend: While life continues, so does development. The study of very old age is the ultimate case in point.

In 1980, Stanford University internist and epidemiologist James Fries recognized that modern medicine was not extending the human lifespan, and yet survival curves were changing. More people were living vitally until eighty-five or ninety, and then dying quickly, like the wonderful one-hoss shay in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem, which ran perfectly for a hundred years and then fell apart all at once.
2

Fries called this phenomenon “compression of morbidity.”
3
In 1900, because most deaths were premature, the human survival “curve” was a diagonal line; now it is more of a rectangle—especially if you have no risk factors (
Figure 7.1
). In 2040 there will be ten times as many eighty-five-year-olds as there were in 1990. This is not because the normal human lifespan is any longer than it was, but because fewer people will die before eighty.
After
eighty the lifespan will reflect little increase. Medical advances like antibiotics, new cancer treatments, and kidney transplants all serve to decrease premature death. But they do not alter the fact that the bodies of most of us, like the one-hoss shay, have not evolved to live past one hundred.

In 2012 the longevity of the Grant Study men, who were selected for physical health, is clearly ahead of the historical curve. While only about 3 percent of the white American males born in 1920 are expected to celebrate ninetieth birthdays, 77 (28 percent) of the 268 Study men already have, and 7 (3 percent) more are eighty-nine and likely to join them. Their projected age of death is already four years longer than that for white males born in 2009.
4
(By way of comparison, only about 18 percent of the gifted Terman men made it to
ninety.
5
) One purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to give readers a view into the future, to a time when living to ninety will have become more commonplace.

Figure 7.1 Percentage of men alive at each age.

Some may ask: How long do we
want
to live? Our society stereotypes the very old as frail, ill, and unhappy. No one likes the prospect of long years confined to a nursing home, helpless, mindless, or in pain. And it can’t be denied that aging means loss. Our bodies begin their long, slow process of failure at thirty; by age seventy we can identify only fifty percent of the smells we recognized at forty. Our vision declines until by eighty few of us can safely drive at night.
6
Even
among the surviving Grant Study nonagenarians, 25 percent are cognitively impaired.

But that means that three out of four Grant Study ninety-year-olds are still cognitively intact. Although we often hear that our brains begin to shrink at twenty and that we will have lost fully 10 percent of our brain cells by seventy, modern brain imaging techniques suggest a less grim picture. Normal brain shrinkage is less than we feared, and estimates so far may also reflect the practice of averaging individuals with specific brain-destructive pathologies—Alzheimer’s, trauma, alcoholism—in with everyone else.
7
In addition, we can speculate that some lost brain matter is the result of judicious “pruning” of cells that are no longer in active use; after all, due to such pruning, our brains contain fewer than half the synapses at twenty-one than they do at five.
8
There may not be as much cause for despair as we fear.

Furthermore, the mental life of the elderly is not as bleak as we are sometimes given to believe. After forty, the fear of death declines steadily and belief in an afterlife becomes more common. Careful epidemiological studies from multiple centers reveal that depression among the elderly does not increase.
9
Indeed, recent studies show that older adults report less depression, lower levels of negative affect, and more assertiveness and positive emotion.
10
As one Terman great-grandmother put it, “I hate my waist, but I love my psyche!” Most of the Grant Study men who reached their eighty-fifth birthdays were glad they did.

The most authoritative study of old age available is the MacArthur Foundation study, which is summarized in Rowe and Kahn’s
Successful Aging.
11
That study refutes the specter of dismal years in a nursing home, finding that the average eighty-five-year-old man will spend only about six months in an institution before he dies, and the average eighty-five-year-old woman about a year and a half. People
who
live to be one hundred, those data show, are usually pretty active at ninety-five.

In the Grant Study men, in fact, for a long time there seemed to be so little cognitive decline that we did not even begin testing them for cognitive function until they were eighty. At that time, 91 percent of them tested at normal levels. Of the seventy men who have so far survived to reach ninety, fifty-eight were cognitively intact at that age, and had showed over the preceding ten years an average decline of only one point on the 41-point Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status (or TICS).
12
(I’ll say more about the TICS shortly.) Almost three-quarters of the Grant Study ninety-year-olds were as sharp as ever, if just a bit slower. It’s true that a majority could no longer give the full name of the vice president: “I know he was a senator from Delaware. . . .” Yes, finding names can be a problem after seventy. So can finding your car in a parking lot!