Nadine Williams

Love Is No Longer All You Need

Love is no longer all you need for happiness, the world’s oldest longitudinal study has found.

As we age, if we acquire emotional intelligence  – the ability to cope with whatever life dishes out – has proven to be a critical factor according to the Grant Study of Adult Development.

Findings from the study, which ran for 62 years from 1938 to 2000 has been published in a new book, Triumphs of Experience, to reveal a surprise recipe for happiness.

Published by its former director, psychiatrist George E Vaillant, the book outlines a few societal assumptions which proved true, such as a happy childhood being a necessity for a happy adult life, but it also states that an unhappy childhood does not count happiness out.

Love and resilience have the greatest influence on a fulfilling later life, it found and a case study of an early applicant to the Grant study proved later life can hold happiness, whatever has happened beforehand.

The case study of Godfrey Minot Camille, who presented as a tall, charming redheaded boy in 1938 told the study he neither liked nor admired his parents and a psychiatrist at the time recorded he had “one of the bleakest childhoods in the study’’.

He was dropped from the study because he was too skinny and his early adult years were peppered with trauma. After graduation, he attempted suicide. He had little to be happy about and found himself in hospital yet again with tuberculosis, followed by the emergence of another character trait – altruism.

However,  he married, had children and the book records how when he was 75 “viewed his past five years as the happiest in his life’’.

In 1967, the author George Vaillant became involved with the study and he analysed 25 years of data collected from 200 respondents studied over their lifetime.

The study was initially meant to examine how a group of promising men coped. All were Harvard graduates and one was John F. Kennedy, while another three became US senators.

While on the subject of maleness, new research claims that men seem to have an evolutionary aversion to being sexually attracted to their mates’ wives.

A University of Missouri study has established that adult males’ testosterone levels drop when interacting with the wife of a friend.

Researchers claim that understanding the biological mechanisms that stopped men competing for each other’s mate may reveal how people form cohesive communities, researchers claim.

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