When he was in college, Young had wanted to be an automotive engineer. But he never rose above a low-paying position in a Denver heating and plumbing firm. In thirty-five years there, his greatest responsibility—installing furnaces—never changed. He took pleasure in his job only because he could build things, which had been one of the pleasures of his childhood. He told one interviewer in detail and with real enthusiasm about furnaces, but he communicated no pride in or commitment to his work role, and no sense of connection to the people he worked with.
At forty-six, when classmates far less privileged and intellectually gifted than he were firmly established in the upper middle class, Young wrote, “I feel deeply inadequate. . . . I have always felt that I could never sell myself.” At fifty, he remained unpromoted and discontented. He was still working twelve hours a day, and often on Saturdays. His work was “the same old rat race,” and his earned income was the lowest in the Study. At sixty, after thirty-five years at it, he said that what he liked best about his job was “the good benefits and the lack of stress.”
For a very long time Young did not involve himself in any community service—or indeed, in any community. His philosophical rationale for this at fifty was, “I know I can’t be my brother’s keeper,” but it appeared to me that in fact he felt too perpetually out of control in his own life to feel safe extending his attention beyond it. This of course reduced even further any chance of his establishing supportive relationships. He was asked on a questionnaire what contributions he had made that would benefit others. “If there is one, I can’t imagine what it would be,” he responded. In mid-adulthood, he was not advancing in his job, and he was too overwhelmed to emerge from self-absorption toward Generativity.
I met Algernon Young when he was forty-seven, two years after his wife had left him. I was struck by the contrast between his Brooks Brothers tweed jacket with the stylish leather patches at the elbows and his cheap shoes and workingman’s hands. Like Heath, I felt that he was immature. He was one of only two Grant Study men who felt continuously overwhelmed by bills, and he told me that he ate alone in diners. He acted like a deferential prep-school boy being interviewed by a teacher, while in fact he was fourteen years my senior.
What stunted the development of Algernon Young after such a promising adolescence? The answer seems to have been a one-two punch of tragic fate. When Young was eleven, his mother was psychiatrically hospitalized for crippling anxiety. Her symptoms turned out to be due to hyperthyroidism, and after thyroid surgery they never recurred. But her temporary loss of control was enough of a shock to Algernon that he quit believing in God. And then, when he was halfway through college, the other shoe dropped.
This time it was his father who was hospitalized, and the circumstances were terrible. After twenty-five years of loyal service to his school, he was fired, and a whiff of scandal attended the firing, concerning a possible mismanagement of funds. The facts were that a major depression had compromised his ability to handle the complex responsibilities of his office.
Like his mother, Algernon’s father recovered from his depression and obtained a prestigious job at another school. But the son never recovered. For the rest of his life he felt (as Willy said about the death of his father in Death of a Salesman) “kind of temporary about myself.” Algernon Young seemed to have lost all faith in everything, including himself. As gifted in math as he was, the moment his father began having trouble handling the school finances, he failed algebra. Then he dropped out of Harvard. He took a job in a factory to support his family, and never returned to college. All of his positive college ratings were made before the Study accepted that he was never coming back.
In our forty years of follow-up we saw no evidence of major depressive disorder in Young himself. Nor did he ever seriously abuse alcohol. He just kept away from people and confined himself to the rational predictability of furnaces. His parents’ sequential abandonments under such frightening circumstances seem to have left him trapped in a fearful need; he couldn’t trust them any longer, yet he wasn’t ready to let them go enough to form new relationships where trust was possible. He tried in his first marriage, only to be abandoned again. At age forty-nine, Young could still say, like a ten-year-old boy, “My main interest is in things mechanical.”
It is not only changes in ourselves that drive us to essay new roles; our interactions with others transform us too. But maturational transformations take place from within. They are the fruit of internalization and identification, not of instruction or even socialization. They happen only when we can metabolize, as it were, those influential others, taking them into ourselves in a profoundly intimate and structural way. There’s a world of difference between knowing something in one’s head and knowing it in one’s gut. When internalization does not take place, one of our main avenues of growth is foiled. As a child Algernon Young was given plenty of love, but after the twin catastrophes of his youth—which, however innocent and inadvertent, must have felt to him as twin failures of the two most important people in his life—he seems to have developed an emotional malabsorption syndrome—he could no longer take anything in. His identificatory capacity gave out in his mid-teens, and so did his growing. Young did not have Asperger’s syndrome, but the jury is still out on the other possible causes of his failure in maturation. It appears that he stopped being able to make use of the love that came his way; contrast his life course with that of Godfrey Camille, who was given so little love at the beginning that even the usually nurturing Grant Study staff dismissed him as a “regular psychoneurotic.” Yet Camille left no stone unturned until he found the love he needed, and then he absorbed it greedily.
When Young was fifty, one of his very few friends died. He told the Study that he had lost a piece of himself, and added, “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” He was addressing a question that more usually preoccupies those who survive into old age: How, over the long years of the adult lifespan, are losses replaced? How do we face the losses that we can never replace? But Young wasn’t old. He was only fifty, and he had stopped growing at eighteen.
In his later years Young’s life improved somewhat, and by the time he died he had technically met my criteria for Intimacy and partial Career Consolidation. His renascence began at fifty-one, when he gave up the agnosticism he had maintained since the early days of his mother’s troubles and rejoined his parents’ church. Probably through the church, Young met and married a widow with two children. When his mother died three years later he coped well, despite his prior dependence on her. His second marriage endured until he died at sixty-six, but it was the partners’ mutual involvement with their church that gave it substance. Study men with richer professional lives and more grandchildren often grew away from the church. But men who were needful of connection late in life sometimes sought it in religious affiliation.28 Looking back, it appeared at first as though Young was returning to the point of crisis, allowing his mother and father to become sources of identification once more, and resuming, slowly, his own truncated development. Certainly the death of parents may release fresh growth in adult life. But even that hope would not be fully realized for the timid Algernon Young.
While Camille, newly returned to his church, gave communion to housebound parishioners and befriended the entire congregation, Young headed straight for the account books and became the (unpaid) church treasurer. At fifty-eight, as a born-again evangelical Baptist, he wrote the Study, “My God has supplied my needs material and otherwise.” At sixty-four he told the Study, “My labor of love to the Lord is being treasurer for the First Baptist Church,” which, he explained, was his greatest interest in life. He was still primarily interested in “mechanical” things. By the time he died at sixty-six, he could finally write, “I am a success with my family.” Camille at the end of his life fell in the top third of the Decathlon, but Young, like Lovelace, received a 0. Admittedly, Camille had had fourteen more years in which to develop.
THE LAST YEAR
S
At age seventy-five, the College men were asked to define what they considered wisdom to be. Here are some of their definitions.
“Empathy through which one must synthesize both care and justice.”
“Tolerance and a capacity to appreciate paradox and irony even as one learns to manage uncertainty.”
“A seamless integration of affect and cognition.”
“Self-awareness combined with an absence of self-absorption.”
“The capacity to ‘hear’ what others say.”
We also asked these seventy-five-year-old parents of the Sixties Generation a provocative question: “Taboos on obscenity, nudity, pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and pornography seem to be dead or dying. Do you believe this is good or bad?” We often received black and white answers. But one Episcopalian minister wrote: “NEITHER. What human beings need are limits to their behavior and freedom to realize their true selves—we really need a societal consensus on limits balanced with freedoms. I think these limits and freedoms and the balance between them change with the culture.” He had put aside absolute convictions about faith, morality, and authority in favor of a new appreciation of their relativity and mutability.
But remember, he was seventy-five when he wrote that reply. In his younger years, according to his daughters, he had been more judgmental. As we mature, we learn from experience how important a dimension Time is, and how profoundly it determines the shape of our reality. As we understand the relativities and complexities of life more deeply, the immature need to believe becomes a mature capacity to trust, and religious ideology makes room for spiritual empathy.
Students of late-life development, like Jane Loevinger at Washington University in St. Louis and Paul Baltes at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin (who was a pioneer in wisdom research), share views very similar to that minister’s.29 Loevinger understands the most mature phase of adult development (which she calls Stage 6 or Integrated) to be characterized by tolerance of ambiguity, reconciliation of inner conflict, and the ability to cherish another’s individuality while respecting 30 For Baltes, it was “an awareness that all judgments interdependence.are a function of, and are relative to, a given cultural and personal value system.31
Sociologist and colleague Monika Ardelt, who brought Charles Boatwright to my attention as the wisest of the Grant Study men, has spent her professional life trying to operationalize Baltes’s views.32 Ardelt examined personality inventories that the men had taken in 1972 and 2000 (see Chapter 3), and derived from the results three components that she considers intrinsic to wisdom and essential to it.33 These were: the cognitive capacity to grasp the deeper significance (both positive and negative) of transient phenomena; the reflective capacity to consider issues from multiple perspectives; and the affective capacity to care deeply about the well-being of others.34 Thus measured, wisdom correlated with maturity of defenses and absence of mental illness at midlife, with close friendships, and with late-life adjustment.
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, to age successfully is to transcend decay. The task of Integrity is to retain human dignity despite the ravages of mortality. This is not a task particular to old age; it is the developmental challenge of all those who face imminent death. At fifty-two, Grant Study member Dr. Eric Carey knew already that he was doomed to an early death from complications of polio. From his wheelchair he articulated the challenge that faced him: “The frustration of seeing what needs to be done and how to do it but being unable to carry it out because of physical limitations . . . has been one of the daily pervading problems of my life in the last four years.” But three years later, he had answered his own challenge: “I have coped . . . by limiting my activities (occupational and social) to the essential ones and the ones that are within the scope of my abilities.” To be able to honor life’s essentials and simultaneously bow to its realities is Integrity in a nutshell.
At fifty-seven, Dr. Carey told the Study that the last five years had been the happiest of his life: “I came to a new sense of fruition and peace with self, wife and children.” He spoke of peace, and his actions portrayed it. He understood that, whenever possible, legacies (both concrete and metaphoric) should be bestowed before death.
At sixty-two, he talked about the risky anesthesia he had recently required for an operation. “Every group gives percentages for people who will die: one out of three will get cancer, one out of five will get heart disease, but in reality one out of one will die. Everybody is mortal.” He was dead a year later from pulmonary insufficiency.
As the Study member I quoted above pointed out, it’s the old who can teach us that life is worthwhile “to its very end.” That is a lesson that it took me, young and arrogant maven of adult development that I once was, thirty years to learn.
6
MARRIAGE
If you have someone who loves you, you’ve got it made.
—CHARLES BOATWRIGHT, Study Interview
MENTAL HEALTH AND THE CAPACITY to love are linked, but the linkages are elusive. We can’t weigh love on a scale, or examine it with special lenses. Poets can encompass it up to a point, but for most of us, psychologists and psychiatrists included, it’s something of a mystery. The importance of intimate, warm, mutual attachment (not just sex, and not even the biological/instinctual drive often called Eros) is the third lesson of the Grant Study. But no aspect of human behavior is assessed more subjectively, or measured less easily, than intimacy.
Fortunately this doesn’t stop us from enjoying love anyway—not only in its passionate aspects, but also in the enduring warmth and comfort of close relationship. Here, for instance, is Charles Boatwright at age eighty-five on the pleasures of his second marriage: “Really just being together. Share each other’s lives and our children’s lives. Snuggle on cold nights.” Jim Hart, who at eighty-one participated with his wife, Julia, in director Robert Waldinger’s Study of Marital Intimacy, told the Study that she was the essence of his life, and called their relationship “a lovely, lovely partnership.” What are his hopes for his marriage? “I want it to stay like it is,” Jim says. “Period. It can’t get better.” Julia’s view of it? They’re best friends, and there’s a physical relationship, if not quite what it was when they were young. But the main thing is: “I adore him. More than I ever did. We laugh a lot. We laugh at ourselves. . . .You can’t take yourself too seriously. . . . I don’t know how we got here, but it’s wonderful.”
This kind of pleasure in the company of another person is quite different from Eriksonian Intimacy as we dealt with it in the last chapter, and throughout this chapter I’ll be making a distinction between the two. Eriksonian Intimacy, like puberty, is a developmental task. It comes later to some people than others, but most of us get there. As fledglings fly from the parental nest, we all must leave our parents’ homes and establish ourselves emotionally in the peer world, sharing space, money, decisions, plans, and other issues of mutual interdependence. The Harvard Study of Adult Development defined Eriksonian Intimacy operationally as ten years of living in an interdependent and committed relationship. But that commitment can take very different forms.
Eriksonian Intimacy is an intimacy of physical and practical proximity. The emotional intimacy of deep relatedness is different. Some couples have a shared emotional economy. There’s a constant circulation between them; they’re under each other’s skin, and happy to have it so. This isn’t the blurred boundary of codependency; it’s a mutuality based on a clear sense of self and other. But it is a knack, like the huge hand-span of a great pianist. Not everyone has it or wants it, and it is not necessary for a fulfilling life.
This chapter will address four questions: What does emotional intimacy look like? What can we learn from marriages that have endured for fifty years or more? What can we learn from marriages that don’t endure? And what do intimacy and mental health have to do with each other?
Investigation of the Grant Study marriages was an eye-opener for me. Although I stand by my rash a
ssertion to The Atlantic that relationship (that is, the capacity for loving attachment) is what matters most in life, I can’t quite say the same for this pronouncement from my first book: “In the Grant Study, there was probably no single longitudinal variable that predicted mental health as clearly as a man’s capacity to remain happily married over time.”1 In 1977, I firmly believed that divorce boded statistically ill for future development and future happiness. But it has since become clear that this was yet another premature conclusion.
Before I proceed, here in Table 6.1 is a summary of the Grant Study men’s marital histories. We’ll be referring to it as we go on.
As you can see, these numbers include all marriages either through 2010, or until one of the partners died. One hundred and seventy-three of the men’s first marriages remained intact, including fifty-one happy ones, seventy-three average ones (which we called “so-so”), and forty-nine unhappy ones. Seventy-four men, including twenty-three of the sixty-two who once divorced, contracted very happy remarriages that have stayed that way through 2010, or through the death of a partner. The thirty-seven remaining divorced men either did not remarry or remarried unhappily.
Table 6.1 Life Course of Study Marriages (1940 through 2010, or until the death of one partner)
* 26 of the 268 original Study members were excluded from Table 6.1. Four of them died in the war, three never married, and 19 withdrew from the Study.
**One man who lived happily all his life with another man in a close interdependent relationship was classified as “Still married; very happy.”
The mean length of marriage for the surviving couples still in their first and only marriage was over sixty years. That’s a nice statistic, if not a surprising one. But the mean length of remarriage for the twenty-three divorced but happily remarried men was almost thirty-five years, a finding that required me, as I will recount in a moment, to rethink de novo my assumptions about divorce, mental health, and the capacity for intimacy.
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Page 19
