This blog is built on a simple premise: relationships are one of the highest-leverage things we can get right, and the skills involved are learnable — yet almost no one is taught them.
Relationships matter more than almost anything
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies of adult life ever conducted, keeps returning the same headline. As its director Robert Waldinger puts it: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” Specifically:
- People more socially connected to family, friends, and community are happier, physically healthier, and longer-lived.
- It’s the quality, not the quantity, of close ties that matters — those most satisfied in their relationships at 50 were the healthiest at 80.
- Good relationships protect the brain too: securely attached partners held sharper memories for longer.
And too many of us are struggling
- In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on loneliness, reporting that about half of U.S. adults had recently felt lonely — with a mortality risk likened to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
- The National Survey of Family Growth estimates a first marriage has roughly a 45% chance of being disrupted — through separation, divorce, or death of a spouse — within fifteen years.
- The strain appears to reach children, too. Parental divorce is consistently associated with worse academic, behavioral, and psychological outcomes — though these are correlations across families that differ in many ways, so how much the divorce itself causes is genuinely unclear.
The skills are learnable — we’re just never taught them
Building and keeping a healthy relationship draws on a fairly specific set of capacities: relational self-awareness, emotional regulation, secure attachment, empathy and compassion, psychological safety, and skill at communication and conflict. Almost none of it is in the curriculum. Many of us grow up without close relational role models, and the cultural stories we absorb are idealized and unhelpful. So we improvise — and tend to seek help only once there’s a crisis, far later than the point at which the knowledge would have done the most good.
That’s the gap this blog tries to chip away at: learning a little about how relationships actually work, before the wheels come off. The posts are me working through the evidence for that bet — taking a single study or idea at a time, being candid about how much weight it can bear, and aiming to end with something concrete you could actually do.