You've probably got your life priorities right. Career growth. Financial security. Stable relationship. And maybe even good health. A quote I recently read by psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and director of Harvard Study of Adult Development, Robert Waldinger, got me thinking about how I measure my life. For over eighty years, the researchers followed people through their entire lives. They tracked everything. Brain scans. Careers. Marriages. Habits. Arguments. And regrets.

The good and the bad experiences.

And after all that time, after all that data, the biggest lesson wasn't all the hustle. The money. Or prestige. It wasn't even health habits, though those matter. None of those things we obsess over was key to a good life.

It was this: good relationships keep us happier, healthier, and help us live longer. In those decades, the people who stayed healthiest and happiest had the good, better and best relationships. Quality connections. People with warm, connected relationships handled stress better. Their bodies stayed healthier longer. Their minds deteriorated less as they aged. The lonely ones declined faster. Got sicker earlier. Reported feeling less happy, even when everything else in their lives looked successful on paper.

Waldinger wrote in their book, The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Study on Happiness, "You might believe that making six figures or landing a new job or upgrading from your old Honda will make you happy, but in short order you will have gotten used to that situation, too, and your brain will move on to the next challenge, the next desire."

He also said something else in their book that we can all identify with.

"Spoiler alert: The good life is a complicated life. For everybody. The good life is joyful… and challenging. Full of love, but also pain. And it never strictly happens; instead, the good life unfolds, through time. It is a process. It includes turmoil, calm, lightness, burdens, struggles, achievements, setbacks, leaps forward, and terrible falls. And of course, the good life always ends in death."

If life is going to hurt anyway, and it will, then the real question is: Who's beside you when it does?

Strong relationships don't take away our suffering.

They make it easier to bear.

People with close relationships still get sick. They still fail. They still lose people they love. But they recover better. They feel less alone inside the pain. Loneliness, on the other hand, ages you. It stresses the body. It wears down the mind. The study found that chronic loneliness is as damaging as smoking or alcoholism.

Life doesn't reward emotional avoidance.

But good relationships don't make life any easier. They're what make a hard life bearable. They're what make joy possible in the middle of pain. My best memories have always been with my closest connections. But I also remember the worst ones. The people you love most can hurt you in ways strangers never could. It's not all good all the time. The good life, as Waldinger describes it, includes "turmoil, calm, lightness, burdens, struggles, achievements, setbacks, leaps forward, and terrible falls."

Every single one of those things hurts more when you're connected to other people. But you feel more alive through all of it.

I think we resist this truth because good relationships feel less controllable than other goals. They require other people, too. All our vulnerabilities. It requires you to be present. And demands forgiveness when you'd rather hold a grudge. People are hard. You can't optimise your way into quality connection. You can't hack intimacy. It takes time to nurture better relationships.

So how do you measure a good life?

When everything else starts fallen apart, your strength, roles, and your certainty, who are you honest with. Who do you trust with your vulnerabilities?

We all know relationships matter the same way as the other milestones we desperately pursue. It's common knowledge. But practically, we live like there's always time for that later.

What this means for how you live

If you had to make one investment with your time and energy, what would give you the biggest return over the course of your entire life?

Not just career success, though work matters. Not just physical health, though your body matters. But the thing that research says, again and again, has the most consistent impact on your health, happiness, and longevity. Good relationships. That might mean calling your sister back. Having an actual conversation with your partner. And not being on your phone. It also means being there for your friend who's going through something hard, even when it's inconvenient. Staying in the room during the difficult conversation. And not shutting down.

Investing in connection the same way you invest in your career is hard.

Harder than I thought.

But with time. With attention. With deliberate effort.

It pays.

The Harvard study measured everything they could. But the experiences that make us come alive are beyond measurement. Maybe that's why we overlook them. The things that matter in life can't be quantified. They accumulate. They become the stories of our lives.

Of who you were and how you loved.

Life is hard. Connection makes it bearable

Waldinger said it.

"Life is hard, and sometimes it comes at you in full attack mode."

You know this already. You've lived through your own version of full attack mode. Maybe you're in it right now. There's no denying that. Life will be difficult. It will always be. But when it gets harder, who's in your corner? Who can you talk to? Who knows your vulnerabilities and stays anyway? Those relationships won't make the hard parts disappear. But they'll make them bearable. They'll remind you why you're here. They'll give you something to fight for when everything else feels pointless.

If you take only one thing from eighty plus years of research, let it be this: the quality of your relationships will determine the quality of your entire life more than almost anything else. Not just your romantic relationships. All of them. Family. Friends. Social connections. The people who see you and know you and want to be there for you anyway.

The good life won't always be easy. It will be complicated. But according to the longest study on human happiness ever conducted? It's worth it.

Every single time.

"Life, in a way, is a long opportunity for corrective experiences."