Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Ep. #1187: Dr. Robert Waldinger on Happiness Lessons from Harvard Researchc

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

What’s the secret to living a long, happy life? How do relationships influence happiness and longevity? How does social connection impact stress and well-being? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and author of The Good Life, to explore the powerful role of relationships in health and happiness. Dr. Waldinger leads the world’s longest-running study on happiness, a ground-breaking project that began in 1938. Drawing from over eight decades of research, Dr. Waldinger offers actionable insights into why relationships are vital and how we can nurture them for a healthier, more fulfilling life. In this interview, you’ll learn . . . - Why relationships are the most important predictor of happiness and longevity - The role of “social fitness” in managing stress and improving well-being - How to identify and address signs of loneliness in your life - The secrets to making new friends and deepening existing connections - How family dynamics shape your ability to build relationships And more… So, if you want to understand how relationships can transform your health and happiness, click play and join the conversation. --- Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (05:46) Harvard study overview (08:53) Cultural differences (10:33) Social fitness (13:29) Relationships and longevity (15:24) Signs of poor socializing (21:54) Quality vs. quantity (26:44) Deepening connections (32:57) Childhood's role (35:19) Parenting mistakes (38:42) Attention as love (39:51) Defining high-quality relationships (44:46) Romantic vs. friendships (50:41) Signs of successful couples --- Mentioned on the Show: Triumph The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation Pulse The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Study on Happiness Robert Waldinger

The best theory we have has to do with stress. That good relationships actually are stress relievers. Like if you think about it, if you have something really upsetting happen, you could feel your body rev up, your heart rate revs up, your breathing gets faster, you might start to sweat.

That's all normal. That's the fight or flight response. It's meant to go back to normal, back to baseline, when the threat is removed. And I don't know if you've had this experience, but sometimes I'll have a really upsetting day, and I'll come home, and I'll complain about it to my partner. And it's like, I can literally feel my body come down.

If you have somebody at home or somebody you can call or somebody in the next cubicle that you can complain to, you can feel that stress recede. And we believe that that's an important part of what keeps us healthy. We need help getting back to baseline. Hello and welcome to a new episode of Muscle for Life. I am your host, Mike Matthews.

Thank you for joining me today for an interview with Dr. Robert Waldinger on the art and science of living a long, healthy, and happy, emphasis on happy life. And this is something that Dr. Waldinger has special insight into because he is the director of the Harvard study of adult development. And he explains what that study is and why it is so interesting in the beginning of this interview.

And he is the author of the book, The Good Life, where he explores some of the key learnings that he has taken away from his work at Harvard studying human specifically adult happiness. Now in this interview, Dr. Waldinger is going to talk about why relationships are the most important predictor of happiness and longevity. He's going to talk about what he calls social fitness and why it's important to build and maintain social fitness, how to identify and address signs of loneliness, how to make new

friends, how to deepen existing connections, and more. Before we start today's episode, I need to tell you about the multivitamin that I take every day. It is called Triumph and it is from my sports nutrition company, Legion. And why do I take it every day? Well, because it is the only sport multivitamin on the market with clinically effective doses of 20 essential vitamins and minerals, as well as 10 ingredients scientifically shown to improve health, performance, and mood and reduce stress, fatigue, and anxiety.

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Hey Bob, thank you for taking the time to do this. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, this is scratching an itch of mine. It's a talk I've been looking forward to just because it's a topic that I'm interested in. And a lot of people listening, I'm sure, are interested in how to live a better life, how to achieve more satisfaction in life, how to achieve more happiness, how to derive more meaning out of life. And of course, that's what we're here to talk

about. And I thought a good place to start would be, if you could just give people a little bit of context around this Harvard study of adult development. And then from there, I would love to get into some of the details that you talk about, particularly in your book, The Good Life, but that of course is based on all this work that you've been doing in this research study.

Sure. So, this study, the Harvard study of adult development, is the longest study of the same people going through their entire lives, the longest study that's ever been done. We started in 1938, 86 years ago, almost 87 years ago, I'm the fourth director, and we followed the same people and their spouses, and their children all the way to the present time.

No study has ever done that before. What we get to see is how lives unfold. From the time these people were teenagers, and then what their kids' lives are like, And so what we get to see is how lives unfold, you know, from the time these people were teenagers and then what their kids' lives are like. And we started with 724 young men. About a third of them were Harvard College undergraduates, sophomores, chosen by their deans

to be fine, upstanding specimens. And they were meant to be a study of normal development from adolescence to young adulthood. And now, of course, we laugh when we think about studying Harvard guys as typical people to study for adolescence to young adult development. But at that time, that's what they chose, all white guys. The other group, about two-thirds, were from Boston's poorest neighborhoods, and from some of the most troubled families. Families known to

social service agencies because there was domestic violence. There was parental mental illness, family illness, physical illness. So kids who had so many strikes against them. And the question was also about how do kids develop normally? So how do kids who are supposed to have things go badly for them, how do they end up doing well? And many of them did. So in both cases, it was, it were,

they were groups that we wanted to study to see what can go right in human development. Then we added women, we added spouses, we added the second generation. Everybody's all white. And so we spend a lot of time tracking what other studies of more diverse groups say. So I don't talk about findings that haven't been corroborated by studies of people of color, for example, studies in other cultures, because we don't want to just put out findings that

are specific to white people and say, oh yeah, that's how everybody lives. So we've been really careful about that. And that point of getting to first principles, basically, of human psychology, of course, makes sense to where it transcends racial barriers. But I'm just curious, in all of the data that has been reviewed, have there been some cultural differences that have stood out to you that seem to matter or be more important for one race or ethnicity versus another? Just a random question. It just seems interesting. Yeah. Well, it's a great question. So some cultural differences.

I mean, we haven't studied African-American groups, but African-Americans living in the United States have to live with all this discrimination all day long. They have to worry about whether it's safe to be where they are. Parents talk about having to have that discussion with their sons, particularly, about how you could get stopped by the police and it could end in something terrible, right? That white parents don't have to do.

So yes, that's a big difference. Other things that are different, for example, in Latino communities, in many families, it's the norm to live at home until you get married. And often large families live together even after the kids get married. And in white families, the norm is to leave home, although a little less so now. But all that is to say there are some of these big cultural differences that we want to be sure to pay attention to when we're talking about how life proceeds for most people. And in your book, you talk about social fitness.

And I made a note of that because a lot of the people listening are used to hearing me talk about physical fitness and health. So I thought it'd be, there's a nice parallel there. And you mentioned that social fitness is very important, maybe as important as physical fitness. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah. Well, that's what we found. So, you know, we've published hundreds of papers and, you know, 11 books and all that. We published so much stuff, but it really boils down to two big findings. One is about physical health and one is about social health.

The physical health is everything you talk about with your listeners all the time. When you take care of your body, when you watch what you eat, when you get regular exercise, don't abuse drugs or alcohol, all of that really matters. For years, sometimes even more than a decade of extra life and disability-free life, healthy life, right? That's one big finding, but we were not new in that department. Yes, we found that in our study, but many people found that earlier.

What we found that surprised us, that we didn't believe was about social fitness, that we found when we looked at people in their 50s, and we looked at everything we knew about them, and then we had followed them all the way out to their 80s. And we said, okay, when we look back at their 50s, what would predict who's going to be a healthy, happy 80-year-old? And we thought it would be blood pressure and cholesterol level.

And those things were important, but the most important predictor of who was going to age in a happy, healthy way, was people's satisfaction with their relationships when they were in their 50s. The people who were most socially connected and had the warmest relationships, stayed the healthiest and lived the longest. And we didn't believe it at first because we say the mind and the body are connected and you know, but really, how could your relationships actually get into your body

and change your physiology? So we've been spending about the last 10 years in our laboratory, trying to understand how this actually works. Many other laboratories are looking at the same thing because now, many studies have found the same thing in all groups, all over the world, how powerful social connections are for health and longevity.

What are some of the working theories about how that is translating to physiological changes that are contributing to wellness and longevity? Yeah. The best theory we have has to do with stress. That good relationships actually are stress relievers. Like if you think about it, if you have something really upsetting happen, you could feel your body rev up, your heart rate revs up, your breathing gets faster, you might start to sweat.

That's all normal. That's the fight or flight response. It's meant to go back to normal, back to baseline when the threat is removed. And I don't know if you've had this experience, but sometimes I'll have a really upsetting day and I'll come home and I'll complain about it to my partner. And it's like, I can literally feel my body calm down. If you have somebody at home or somebody you can call or somebody in the next cubicle that

you can complain to, you can feel that stress recede. And we believe that that's an important part of what keeps us healthy. We need help getting back to baseline. What we think happens is that people who are lonely, people who are isolated, don't have anybody to do that with. And one in four people in the US says, there's no one in the world they can talk to about that with. And one in four people in the US says there's no one in the world they can talk to about personal matters. So this is real, like 25%. We think that those people stay in a

low level fight or flight response. And that what that does is it sets up chronic inflammation that breaks down joints, breaks down coronary arteries, it weakens the immune system so we're more susceptible to infection, all these kinds of things that we need stress relief in order to keep us healthy and isolation makes us chronically stressed. I'm going to ask selfishly here. As someone who works a lot and for a long time now, and that's just my default, there's something in the way that I'm wired where I'm

a very goal-seeking type of person where I decide on this is the next thing that I want to do, and then my instinct is to do nothing else but that. Like, there's a part of me that just wants to do that, actually doesn't even want to go to the gym, sometimes doesn't even want to eat food. And I have to actually just like, okay, it's time to go to the gym now,

it's time to hop on my bike and do my cardio, it's time to go make a meal. And so something that I've consciously deprioritized, really for the last decade since I've been focusing mostly on my career, is socialization. And I can say that I've definitely experienced exactly what you said, where there is certainly a stressful relief that comes with positive

social interactions. And I don't know if I would say my awareness is not necessarily struggling with the balance, but I will say that my life has been very imbalanced in that way by design. I wonder, I'm not sure that wiring is going to change in me. Like I think I would actually be deeply unhappy if I were to flip that and I were to put a lot of time into socializing and make a lot of phone calls and hang out and then not really pursue goals. I know that there are a lot of people listening

who probably tend to be the same way. People who, for example, take their fitness seriously in my experience, often are just similarly driven in other areas of life, and are quick to neglect socializing because it feels easy to delete. So two questions just with that little preamble. One is, what would some of the symptoms or signs of having too little socialization, what might that look like where if somebody were speaking with

you and this maybe isn't an easily answered question, I'm just curious where if somebody could benefit from additional socialization, and this maybe isn't an easily answered question, I'm just curious where if somebody could benefit from additional socialization, how might that manifest in their life? And then the follow-up is just, what are your thoughts on the minimum effective dose kind of approach to socialization

to prevent the downsides? Maybe we're not gonna get all of the potential upside yet, maybe that's later in life. 10,000 steps, 30 minutes a day, right? Well, okay. So the first question is, how does it show up? How would you know if you needed more socializing? Well, one way is simply, it's a really obvious way. It's, do you feel lonely? Do you feel less connected to other people than you would like to? And as many as one in three people feels lonely much of the time when you ask them, when they do these large surveys. So one is, and loneliness is a subjective experience. You can be lonely in the middle of a crowd, or you can be perfectly happy as a hermit on a mountaintop.

So loneliness is in the eye of the beholder. So one question is, am I lonely? That might be, okay, I work, work, work, work, work, I work nonstop, but then I have my Saturday free and I don't have anything to do, I don't have anybody to talk to, and I don't have anything to do, I don't have anybody to talk to, and I'm lonely. That's a good sign.

That's an important sign to take seriously. Another is, I'm working and working, working and yeah, I'm a working person and I like working, but are you burning out? Because that's another sign that you may not have enough variation in your life that includes social contact, does not work. Right? So I would say both of those are kind of the two big signs. And then you asked about the dose, which is a great question because, you know, many of us are introverts.

We're all somewhere on a spectrum from introverts who actually don't need a lot of people in their lives to extroverts who want a lot of people in their lives. And most of us are somewhere in between. And if you're an introvert, you know, actually, as you were saying, if you were to call people up all the time, it would be stressful for you. So don't do that. So, I don't.

I do make some time. I do have a handful of people I stay close with, but I wouldn't say it's scheduled, but it usually is during the semi, like, okay, I'm going to go make some food now for dinner. Okay, great. I'm going to make a phone call. I'll socialize while I'm making food.

You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You sound like my sons who are in their 30s. They're always doing something else while they talk to me. They're always riding their bike or cooking dinner or anything. Yeah, or I'll do that. I'm like, cool, I got to do my 30 minutes of cardio.

Good. So now I'm going to call, you know, my buddy and we'll talk about some business things or whatever, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, but, but the, I think the important thing here is that there's nothing wrong with being an introvert. There's nothing wrong with wanting fewer people in your life.

In fact, there's a lot right with it. That each of us, we want to check in with ourselves, what's the right amount of socializing for me? You don't want too much if that's not good for you. You don't want to have too little if you're more on the extroverted side. It's really a judgment call and you can make changes. That's one of the things we talk about in the book. What can you do if you don't have enough people

in your life or if you want to strengthen some of the relationships you already have? So we talk about that. What we do think is that everybody, no matter how shy you might be or introverted, everybody needs one or two people in their life who they feel has their back. We asked our study participants at one point, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared? Most people could list a number of people, but some people couldn't list anyone. And those were among our most stressed people whose health broke down sooner. So everybody needs somebody. Is there a dimension here related to quantity and quality where, so again, speaking personally, of what seems to work well for me is I have a large number

of acquaintances, but I have a small number of close friends and I have a deeper connection with those people. And I could probably count it on my one hand, certainly not more than 10, and maybe half of those get kind of regular time and I've been making phone calls and I get to see people in person here and there and that seems to work well for me but is that though the depth of the connection can maybe make up for the lack of quantity and then in some people works the way around where it's they find that having more shallow relationships actually it works better for them than only having a few people that they're really close with and a lot of other people are just kind of out on the periphery? Yeah, yeah.

I think that's a great question, because I think, you know, when you study thousands of lives, what the first thing you learn is one size never fits all. So I think there are people, as you're suggesting, there are people for whom superficial friendships are fine and they're enough. There are other people for whom that would be terrible. They need some deep friendships.

They need some really confiding friendships. We're all built differently in that way. So we all need people, but we need people in different ways, depending on who we are. We will resume today's episode shortly, but first I need to tell you about my best-selling fitness mindset manual for breaking through mental resistance and barriers, building unshakable discipline, and keeping your goals alive when

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you will make way more mistakes than you want to make, but there's also this, you can't fail unless you give up. So if you're feeling overwhelmed in your fitness, But there's also this, you can't fail unless you give up. So if you're feeling overwhelmed in your fitness, if you are struggling with laziness or procrastination or self-doubt, if you are trying to reignite your passion for working out, and if you'd like some strategies for developing a resilient mindset

that will empower you to stick with your fitness for the long haul because that's the ultimate goal, not just to get into shape, to stay in shape for the rest of our lives. Then head over to Amazon now and pick up a copy of the little black book of workout motivation and enjoy. You mentioned that in the book, you also talk about effective ways to create that connection with people, whether it's with new people or deepening connections

with existing people. I'm curious, what are some of the most effective, because that's like at a tactical level, it sounds like of, all right, what do I do? I wanna try it, but how do I do this? Okay. I got tactics and they're based on research. One question, there are two categories that we could think about. One is, I want to be closer to the people I already have in my life.

Another category is, I don't have enough people in my life. I'd like to bring some new people in, right? So for the people you'd like to be closer to who you already know, could be family, could be friends, could be workmates, right? What we find is frequency matters. So little contacts, frequent contacts, make a big difference. The people who were the best at this were the people who reached out regularly to other people.

You know, earlier on, we studied many people who didn't grow up in the digital age, so there weren't texts and there wasn't email. They'd call people on the phone. They'd make sure they went for walks together or they went bowling twice a week together or whatever they might have done. Now, it can be a text, a phone call while you're making dinner, where you just say, I just want to say hi, just want to see how your day is and share a little bit about yourself. People love to talk about themselves, so be curious about the other people. Just reach out.

But I would say do it often. And that's what we found worked best. And also make sure that you regularly do this with a few people. Like if there are a few people you want to make sure stay in your life, make sure you're do this with a few people. If there are a few people you want to make sure stay in your life, make sure you're in touch with them weekly, sometimes daily. Just reach out and you can do that while you're on the elliptical trainer.

You can do that while you're riding your bike or making dinner. You don't even have to add. You're driving your kids to soccer or whatever. Exactly. You don't have to add time even. I'll say working out actually lends itself well to that too. If you have somebody, hey, do you want to start going to the gym together if you live around and you can kind of coordinate schedules? Totally. And I bet you know from your work that actually when you do that you're more

likely to show up at the gym. Somebody's waiting for you. Absolutely. Training with somebody else I think is much more enjoyable. I've been training solo for some time now just because the circumstances where I live and I moved here just recently. I haven't put really that much time into networking. I've met a few people but I've gone it both ways. I live in Oc here just recently. I haven't put really that much time into networking. I've met a few people, but I've gone it both ways. I live in Ocala, Florida. So middle of the state, moved here a few years ago. Yeah, yeah, so I've done it both ways

and training with somebody certainly is more enjoyable all around. Yeah, I guess the only benefit, talk about multitasking, of training solo is I do flashcards for some educational stuff. I do that in between sets. I get through my flashcards usually by the end of the workout, which otherwise I have

to do some other time, but I still would take the socializing over the flashcards. They're not quite the same. Well, it doesn't have to be either or. You can do a little bit. Okay, so that's the category of getting closer to the people who are already in your life. More contact. The other is bringing new people in. How do you do that? Which in my experience and I think in many other people's experience gets harder as an adult. It seems to be harder to make

actual friends than it was when I was younger. Totally. Especially for those of us who are now working remotely a lot of the time. I'm sitting here working mostly by myself. You're doing the same. What I would say the best way to do this, and again, there's been really good research on this, is to do something you care about and do it with people who you don't yet know and the same people again and again. Right?

So it could be anything. It could be joining a soccer league. Right? It could be joining a gardening club. It could be joining a running club, it could be joining a running club or cycling group, it could be working to prevent climate change. It could be anything. If you like it or you care about it and you do this with other people,

first of all, you have an immediate thing to talk about because you both have this shared interest, and you're more likely to strike up a conversation with strangers if you see them again and again. And then eventually, some of those conversations might deepen into friendships. So it's why like, you know, when my kids went to a great big new school, you know, we said to them, join clubs, get involved in activities.

It wasn't just for the activities, it was because they'd make friends and it worked that way. Well, it works that way for adults too. In a fitness context, that's one of the reasons why many people enjoy taking fitness classes because they go at the same time every week it tends to be the same people and that becomes a big part of why they keep going to it even though let's say they have the discipline do the exercise outside of the class that's not really the point. Exactly and we had

people in our study who did that who found their best friends at a gym, right? You know, a lot of people go to churches and other houses of worship for the same reason, not even so much for the religion as for the social connections. Absolutely. Can you talk a bit about how our early life, our family experiences can influence our ability to create and maintain healthy life relationships later in our life. And for those of us who are parents or going to become parents, there are some lessons that we can learn there for raising our children, right? And try to avoid the mistakes that might make it harder for them to do this later in life

and hopefully give them a leg up as they are growing up so they can create, confine, and create these relationships. Yeah, yeah. So the primary place, the main place we learn how to make relationships is in our families. So parents can teach kids how to get along with people, right? How to hold a conversation, how not to interrupt, how to be curious about the other person, how to deal with a disagreement. Like that's a big deal. How do you deal with a disagreement without somebody getting hurt or people going away mad or, you know, how do you do that?

Parents do a lot to teach that. One of the places kids learn about relationships socializing is at family meals. So families that eat together have kids who are much more socialized, right, who do better in school, who do better even at their academic subjects, and they certainly do better getting along with other kids, because parents really are the first role models for this. So what we hope, you know, ideally families are peaceful and people are kind to each other, and that's what children learn. They learn that the world is a basically a good decent place and people are nice

to each other with exceptions right and that's what we hope kids learn. There's also a whole thing called social and emotional learning that has been developed for kids in school where they they teach kids about, how do you manage your feelings? How do you manage disagreements with another kid? All that stuff. So they teach some of these skills in school, and those children do so much better when they've had these kinds of classes.

Are there any mistakes that are common and significantly detrimental here with parenting? Just that you've seen in the data where there are a few things that are great and there are a few things that are really not great. Yeah. Consistency is the most important thing for a kid. So probably the biggest mistake is to be wildly inconsistent as a parent. Like, you know, if you say you're going to do something, do it. If you say you're going to pick your child up at such and such a time, be there on time.

And I know that sounds trivial, but it really matters for kids. Consistency matters a lot. So that's one thing. Another is to make sure that you manage your own feelings as a parent and don't simply take them out on your child. If you're really starting to get overwhelmed by your own feelings, maybe it's anger or anxiety, step away when you can and just give yourself a moment to breathe so that you don't just take it out on a child who probably is much more defenseless and can't really understand what's happening in that way. So parents who learn to manage their own feelings are by far the best parents.

To some degree, I'm sure that kids, they learn to interact with others the way their parents interact with them, so... Totally. I mean, when you watch little kids, they're just sponges for what adults do. the way their parents interact with them. Totally. I mean, when you watch the little kids, they're just sponges for what adults do. They take us in. So we want to model.

Remember, what you do is way more powerful than what you tell your child, right? So you want to model the kind of person you want your child to be. That's also very true in the context of health and fitness, particularly nutrition, where I've heard from many parents over the years who struggle with kids who only want to eat junk food. And this isn't always the case, but often, where did the kid learn about junk food

and how often have they seen the parent eat some version of it or literally the same food? And so that had then turned into a pattern for both the parents and the kid. And then so the parents were making a change and were then, though, struggling with getting the kid to make the change as well. And so it's, I think,

very helpful for parents to think about that, that the kids are going to model a lot of what they see. And so from the beginning, if they see you eating well and taking care of yourself, that is going to be more powerful than telling them the importance of eating the broccoli. You're trying to explain that to a five-year-old. Right. Right. You just showed them.

Similarly with using screens, right? It's what we model even more than, you know, like if we're always on our screens, if we're always half listening to our child, they'll do the same thing. Absolutely. Which brings me to something I want to ask you about, which is this idea that attention is the most basic form of love and how to apply that in relationships. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. That comes from one of my Zen teachers, John Tarrant. If you think about it, our full undivided attention is really the most valuable thing we have to give to each other, and certainly to give to a child. Rather than letting ourselves be distracted, to just be fully there, looking at each other and focusing on each other. It's really hard to do in this age of distraction.

Most of us have multiple screens open at the same time, not just one. How can we be present for each other in real life when we've got all these screens distracting us? I would say that is probably one of the hardest things for us to train ourselves to do, but it's so valuable. And you know what it's like when somebody's giving you their full attention.

It just feels great. Yeah, I want to come back quickly to this point of the quality of, and I meant to ask you about this, the quality of relationships. What, how would you define a high quality relationship? Again, a good, not simple question. I would say a relationship where each person feels as free as possible to be themselves. Right? Like, you know, what are the relationships where I really have to stifle huge parts of myself?

Right? relationships where I really have to stifle huge parts of myself because that's not okay with you, for me to just be how I am. Many of us end up getting into relationships where we feel like we have to turn ourselves inside out to hold on to the relationship. I would say that notice where you feel the freest and the most relaxed with another person. That's the signal of a good quality relationship.

Another is relationships that are more mutual. In some relationships, one person does all the giving and one person does all the taking. And that ends up being really bad. It feels bad. I've talked to my wife about this in a moment. She's gotten savvier though, because she's a sweet person. That's just her nature. But she has been taken advantage of over the years.

And she's gotten better though. She's gotten better at seeing it and stopping it, but it's in her nature to just give and some people, they zone in on that and they extract. That's what they're good at. You know, I'm so sympathetic to your wife because I have that problem too and I've had to learn to, first of all, to notice, wait, this doesn't feel so good. Then to really be clear with other people about what I can do and what I can't, what I want to do, what I don't want to do.

It's hard for me, but I've gotten better at it. It still makes her uncomfortable to set those boundaries, but at least now she's aware of it and willing to do it. Me too. I totally get what she goes through. But it's so useful to learn to do that. I would say it's crucial. I think about somebody in your position where you probably have a lot of people asking a lot of things of you a lot of the time,

and you could lose yourself in that entirely. I mean, if you weren't to stay vigilant about what you're okay with and what you're not okay with and be willing to assert yourself when necessary. Yeah. Well, the other thing is what we forget is that actually people appreciate it when we're clear about what we want and what we don't want, what we can do and what we can't. That you know how often you'll say to someone, are you sure this is okay? Or I don't want to bother you with this.

What if you could really trust the person that if they say it's okay, it's really okay, right? And if it isn't okay, they'll tell you. Often I will say that to people. I'll say, if this isn't okay, I promise I will tell you. You can see people calm down when they've made a request and I say yes, and they're worried about it.

It's a relief when you say, no, I can't do that. Absolutely. Just coming back quickly to this point of being able to be yourself, I think that also is a good signal, at least I think in my own experience, of a potential for a high quality relationship too, where for whatever reason, over the years, thinking back, there have just been people for whatever reason, I just wasn't comfortable. There was something about that I just knew I had to not be someone I'm not, but I just wasn't comfortable. I just, there was something about that. I just knew I had to not be someone I'm not, but I just couldn't be exactly who I am

and say what I really think. And that's just in the initial interactions. Whereas other people, it's just been a different experience where within 30 minutes of talking with them, I don't have that feeling at all. I have, it just can feel like I can communicate openly, freely. Even if we disagree on things, it's not a big deal.

We can disagree on things, that's okay. When you said that, I was like, that's interesting actually because you can get a sense of that. It doesn't take much interaction. Exactly. It's worth trusting that sense. Because we don't have to be friends with everybody. We're not going to be, and so it's okay to say, okay, that person I'm probably not going to be good friends with.

We can be friendly, we can be cordial, if we're neighbors, if we're coworkers. Then this other person, wow, I really can talk with this person. I wanna shift gears to romantic relationships and just wanna hear your thoughts on how that arena may differ from the friends and family arena. And if there are different impacts in terms of well-being or

different factors to take into account when trying to make romantic relationships work. Well, it's interesting because we think of them as so different, and there is, of course, a sexual element, and that's the bedrock. You want to be sexually attracted to each other. But then over and above that, you want a lot of the same things. Because sex is one part of a romantic relationship, but it's only one part.

Then there are all the other hours of the day when you're going to be doing other stuff together. So you want that same sense of, well, I can be myself with this person. I can be honest. I can get as much as I give or at least roughly it's in some sort of parody. My wife and I give each other different things for sure, but neither of us feels taken advantage of,

or like I'm the one who does all the giving or all the taking. I think in some ways over and above the sex and the romance part, we want a lot of the same things in our romantic relationships. In fact, the difficulty is when the physical attraction blinds us to, oh wait, I actually don't feel good when I'm with this person much of the time, right? Or I can't be myself. Or really important to get that before you start making deep commitments to somebody.

I've tried to have this conversation a few times before with people in a couple cases. I mean, I explicitly, my opinion was you should not live your life with this person and here are the reasons why. And in a few cases, they did it anyway and a few there, it not it's not going so well it's just not you know along those lines what I would say is I've seen many people say well I love this person I want to be together and they'll change over time or I'll change them I would say that is a real warning signal that you should step away.

Or at least you should say to yourself, if this never changes, is this okay? Because it's very likely it will not change. And that's because we are who we are. It takes so much work on ourselves, at least in my experience, to make even minor improvements at a deeper level. Okay, if there's enough pressure,

we can force ourselves to have better manners or something like that. But no, to make deep lasting changes, it takes so much work. So I've had this discussion too, or it's like, how much work is this person currently putting into real work that has some probability of doing something? How much work are they putting into themselves right now? Oh, none. Okay. Well, you think that's going to change? You think they're going to go from like, they're an adult now, right?

So they're going to go from putting zero hours a week into improving themselves to 10, 15, 20 plus hours a week, never gonna happen. And so I've said, it's probably, maybe this is cynical, but I would say that you should probably assume, unfortunately, that things are gonna get worse over time, not better. And again, let's be being cynical, but let's not assume that just somehow magically, this person, who they are, is just gonna, it's just gonna get better. It's gonna get

better over time because of time. And you and I think for me, the question that's been the most helpful is, will this be okay if for you, if it never changes? Are you is this okay for you to sign up for this if it never changes? Because that's that's what you have now, maybe what you get. And yep, and even that can be difficult maybe to face realistically. And partly, it seems to be that it's hard for us to I think this is just probably universal, it's hard for us to, and I think this is just probably universal, it's hard for us to envision how bad the experience of something can be in the future and really

understand what it's going to be like to live through that. It's easy to intellectualize it and be like, oh yeah, I'm sure it'll be fine. It won't be that bad," and dismiss it. And then you actually go through it, and you would say, oh, this is the worst period of my life, and I did not appreciate what this was really going to be like. You know, the other thing people can do is they can see if the other person will, for example, do couples therapy. Because before you make a commitment, before you get married or have a child,

because couples therapy can help you clarify. Actually, couples therapy isn't designed to keep people together. It's designed to help them see whether they work well together. And maybe they can work better together. Maybe they can't. Maybe sometimes a really good couples therapy helps

people see that they need to break up. And that turns out to be the best decision. So that's another route that people can take if they feel really uncertain and really stuck in that uncertainty. Are there some commonalities of couples that work well together outside of the few things that you've mentioned? Like for example, is some sort of shared goals,

is that important or shared interests or whatever else? I don't know. Shared interests and goals help a lot, like big goals, right? Like you want to agree on the big things in life. How important are material things to you in life? People differ a lot. How important is having kids?

How important is religion? How important? These are big things that you really want to know about before you start down a lifelong path together. I think the other thing, probably the best indicator of how a couple is going to do is how they work out conflicts. So every couple has conflicts. That's not a problem. It's really, can we work things out in a way where each of us comes out feeling okay, feeling okay about ourselves and about each other? If we can do that, then we're set up probably to do pretty well because life is going to bring challenges and it's going to bring conflicts. So the real question is not whether we have

conflicts, it's how do we work them out? And especially as the stakes go up, right? I mean, okay, you get married now and then you bring children into it and there are new responsibilities and life isn't all just whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it. And there might be some financial pressure now that was not there previously. And so maybe you don't do whenever you want to do it. And there might be some financial pressure now that was not there previously. And so maybe you actually didn't even know how you're going to respond to that, because now you have all these added expenses of raising a family and so forth.

I've just seen these things. Well, we're coming up on the hour here. And so I just want to be respectful of your time, because I know you have to run. So thank you. This was a great discussion. I got to basically everything I wanted to ask you about. The final thing I wanted to ask you about was social media to get your opinions on that. But we got most of everything done. Well, it's mixed. A lot about social media

depends on how we use it. It can connect us to each other in good ways, and it can be a terrible rabbit hole, right? And so the people who use it passively and as a way to compare themselves to others, those people get more and more unhappy. And the people who use it actively to connect with others, that's a way that it works. Well, anyway, I really enjoyed this discussion. It was great to get to talk with you.

Same, yeah, so Thanks again for doing it. Of course, the book is The Good Life. Then is there anything else that you'd like people to know about, where they might find you, find your research, just anything at all? Oh, yeah. I have a website, robertwaldinger.com. It's alloneword.com.

I'd love for people to come to the website. I have a newsletter every couple of weeks. Great. So anyone still listening, you're probably going to like what else Bob is up to. So robertwoldinger.com. Well, thank you. This was a pleasure. Before we terminate today's episode, I need to tell you about the pre-workout supplement

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