The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (31 page)

W
hen Natalie attended an eight-week workshop called Meet the Man of Your Dreams, she didn’t think she ever would. At fifty, her romantic dreams were modest: she wanted to meet someone to go hiking with and maybe go out for a bite to eat afterward. “Frankly, I asked myself what I was doing there,” Natalie recalled, her expressive mouth turned down in a frown. It was a steamy June afternoon, barely a month after I had attended her magnificent wedding and we were cooling off in my dining room, curtains drawn against the heat, while she recounted some of the stranger episodes of her romantic history. Though I didn’t know her very well (I was on the groom’s side), I had invited Natalie over to tell me how she and the man of her dreams had become an item. It turned out that the wry wink in the workshop’s title didn’t negate its meaning. Most people think they
will
find the man or woman of their dreams. Deep down, they believe there is a perfect match for them somewhere out there—a
bashert
, the Yiddish word for a predestined soul-mate.
¹
And even though she was a free-thinker and a survivor of the sexual revolution, Natalie, in her heart of hearts, was no different.

Ultimately, Natalie’s face-to-face social encounters transformed her life in ways she’d never imagined, particularly when it came to meeting her
bashert
. In that respect she was like nearly three-quarters of all couples in the industrialized world, according to surveys of how people find their romantic partners. Their real-world social
connections—the people, places, and occupations they share—are typically what bring them together.
²

MEETING THE MAN OF YOUR DREAMS

A movement therapist, Natalie had swapped attendance at one of her own dance workshops for the romantic one, as a courtesy to another member of her professional women’s network. But her heart wasn’t in it. After a brief marriage in her early twenties, which produced a daughter, now grown, she’d had a couple of relationships, each lasting a year or two. Though she’d had a handful of chance encounters (including a fling with someone she met on a subway platform when they both arrived late to meet up with friends), she intentionally set out to connect with new people. As an outsider, she had to. In the nineties Natalie had moved from France to Montreal, and “not being a bar person,” she had first tried to meet her soulmate through personal ads. “My priority was listening to the quality of the voice on the recorded message,” she said, that being her only honest signal. Then she tried two different Internet dating sites before labeling the online vetting process “disgusting” and giving up on it. She’d given romance her best shot, she thought, and came to the conclusion that what she wanted didn’t exist.

When her acquaintance, the workshop leader, asked each attendee to list what she was looking for in a man, Natalie was not only taken aback by the question, she was stumped. “It was the first time I had to write down what I wanted, exactly.” After a few minutes of hard thinking, her list looked like this:

Little did she know it, but Natalie was describing my friend Lou. A gregarious man who had lived in Egypt, Switzerland, and Canada, Lou was a widower with three grown children; he spoke several languages and had been around the block a time or two. When the workshop leader asked the participants where they hoped to meet their prospective partners, “that’s when it occurred to me I wanted to meet him in a Jewish milieu,” Natalie said. This surprised her. She was the only daughter of two secular Jews who had met in a refugee camp after having lost their respective families in the Holocaust. They had raised Natalie as a secular citizen of the French Republic. Period. There was no religious observance at all in her house when she was growing up. And aside from some dabbling in Eastern mysticism, there had been none at all for Natalie as an adult. So what was this all about?

BU-JEWS AND HU-JEWS

Natalie and Lou met in the most Jewish milieu of all, a synagogue. But they didn’t just bump into each other while making small talk over crusty hummus and stale pita pockets at the post-service kiddush, though to be sure, other romances have been launched that way. They met at Bakol, a biannual weekend Jewish spirituality retreat sponsored by their local Reconstructionist congregation. A progressive movement that split off from mainstream Judaism in the 1940s, Reconstructionists believe in maintaining most of the Jewish traditions, such as lighting Sabbath candles and going to synagogue, while they largely reject the idea of a supernatural, anthropomorphic God (so much for divine intervention in one’s love life).

If Reconstructionism is a splinter group of traditional Jewish
belief, Bakol is a splinter of a splinter. The participants are spiritual seekers, some of them “Bu-Jews”—Jews who engage in Buddhist practices such as meditation—and some of them “Hu-Jews”—secular humanists (professionals and academics mostly) who enjoy yoga almost as much as they relish dissecting philosophical texts. The important point is that the couple met at a spiritual retreat led by a progressive rabbi, held in the clubhouse of an empty Jewish summer camp.

The milieu wasn’t expressly romantic, and for the first few years of the program, Lou was in no mood for love, as we shall see. But it was an intimate environment that brought twenty like-minded people with similar backgrounds together twice a year for weekend retreats. Not everything had to be said out loud; the participants’ shared experiences established a baseline of mutual trust. Here, then, was a social network within a social network, a small, tight circle inside an already circumscribed circle.

SHELTER FROM THE STORM

As social support systems go, marriage is unique. One might think that all couples who live together enjoy exactly the same benefits. But compared to cohabiters, married people enjoy stronger, more stable relationships and better physical and psychological health. They are far less likely to be alcoholics or depressed. They live longer, happier lives, even when scientists control for what shape they were in before they tied the knot.
³
This is true in almost all developed countries, no matter how progressive or conservative the common culture. One study published in the late nineties showed that in seventeen industrialized nations—including Canada, Britain, and most of Europe—married couples are substantially happier than those who live together. Meanwhile, couples who live together are happier than people who are single or divorced.
⁴

The impact of face-to-face contact on our love lives seems to be on a continuum, with greater commitment bringing greater
rewards. Now that nearly two-thirds of American newlyweds live together before they marry—an increase of 1,500 percent over the past half-century, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research—it’s reassuring to know that the benefits of living together aren’t completely nil, as was thought as recently as the late nineties.
⁵
Still, the commitment of marriage provides an added layer of protection. Whether the couple plans to get married when they move in together is what matters. If sharing a roof and a bed are preludes to marriage, then cohabitation presents no risk to the relationship and, by extension, to the couple’s happiness.
⁶
But if the living arrangement just happened and stayed that way through sheer inertia, couples who live together are more likely to split than married couples.

In a book about twenty-somethings that twenty-something-year-old Samantha Henig co-wrote with her mother, Robin Marantz Henig, the younger Henig describes what she calls “sliding”:

The difference between sliding and deciding is crucial, and not just because that key distinction is one of the best predictors of the longevity of a relationship. Many Americans say that the only person they really trust is their spouse, which suggests that millions of us are just one person away from having no one at all. This is especially true for men, most of whom depend on their wives not only to give them shelter from the storm, as Bob Dylan put it, but to monitor their health and to build and maintain a web of social relationships that buffers both husband and wife for as long as the marriage lasts. Spouses in good marriages damp down each other’s stress levels—a hidden system of emotional outsourcing—and wives are often their husbands’ entry ticket into a rich social world. For many men, simply being married induces the village effect.

But women benefit from marriage too, and not just financially. One friend, a highly accomplished professional woman living in a region that recognizes civil unions, recently married the man she had been living with, happily, for thirty-five years. She was surprised to discover that her new status was not just a bureaucratic rubber-stamping of their relationship. Being married made her feel different, she told me: “More confident in myself. More confident in the relationship, and more secure in my ability to make decisions that affect us both.”

I was stunned. I knew that a good marriage offers resistance to colds, but to existential self-doubt? This is rarely talked about, even among women. Nor is it measured by epidemiologists, who might measure blood pressure and cortisol levels but rarely the emotional ballast of those who know that someone always has their back.

Other than providing economic stability, at first no one knew why marriage was so protective of individuals’ well-being. As of the
Enlightenment, they just knew that it was. By the late 1700s, marriage had become less of a public agreement with often draconian private consequences and more of a private agreement with some public consequences; as the social historian Stephanie Coontz writes, “Ordinary people more and more frequently talked about marriage as the route to happiness and peace.”
⁸
Marriage was morphing from a business transaction between the bride and groom’s parents to a public avowal of the couple’s love and devotion to each other.

It wasn’t until the mid 1800s, though, that William Farr, a physician hired by the British Registrar to keep track of births and deaths, discovered that marriage was also tightly linked to personal health. As France kept better demographic records, Farr set about developing models by looking at the French statistics first. Surveying data from twenty-five million French adults, he separated the population into three groups: married, never married, and widowed. Farr then took a close look at how likely people in each category were to get sick and die, a tragically common occurrence before antiseptics and antibiotics were invented (in the mid 1800s most Europeans were dead before they hit forty).
⁹
Having observed that the never-marrieds died “in undue proportion” compared to married people, and that the widowed were at the highest risk of premature death, Farr reasonably concluded that “marriage is a healthy estate.” Gay, cohabiting, or divorced people weren’t included in his Victorian-era roundup, of course, but contemporary epidemiologists who have added them to the mix have largely confirmed Farr’s summary statement: “The single person is more likely to be wrecked on his voyage than the lives joined together in matrimony.” As long as the lives are peaceably joined, that is—an important proviso that I’ll get to in a moment.
¹⁰

Dr. Farr was the first to show that married people have a longevity advantage over singles. However, sampling a population at one fell swoop meant he had simply found a correlation. It might not
be that married life was so salubrious, but that robust types might be more likely to get married in the first place. It didn’t take long before critics raised that objection. In the late 1800s, only a few decades after Farr published his paper, a Dutch physician named Douwe Lubach suggested that people with “physical handicaps, mental sufferings or infamy” tended to be single, and that it was their illnesses and disabilities, not their marital status, that jinxed their lifespans. This argument, called the selection hypothesis, was later echoed a tad more genteelly by Dutch mathematician Barend Turksma. An advisor to the city of Amsterdam at the turn of the twentieth century, Turksma suggested that those in poor health, or with “the least vitality,” could hardly be good providers and thus “are almost all obliged to spend their life unmarried.” His wording suggested that flawed men (say, alcoholics) were voluntarily withdrawing from the dating pool. As any evolutionary psychologist will tell you, though, it was more likely the case that judicious women wouldn’t have them.

Even taking into account women’s longstanding preference for stalwart, dependable guys, as soon as scientists started keeping track they documented an inexorable trend toward an increasingly larger gap between the lifespans of married couples and those of single, widowed, and divorced folks. Barring extraordinary tragedies such as the Dutch hunger winter, which killed a disproportionate number of single and divorced men, and the Holocaust, which wiped out entire communities (including statistician Barend Turksma and his wife, at Dachau in 1942), under normal circumstances married people lived longer. It hardly mattered whether you were a French laborer in the mid 1800s, a 1970s flower child in the Netherlands, a Thatcher-era female lawyer in Britain, or an American software engineer working sixteen hours a day in twenty-first-century Silicon Valley. If you were married or living in a long-term relationship with a loving partner, you’d be much more likely to be happy and healthy—not to mention financially solvent—than
if you were single or divorced. And it wasn’t just because you started out that way.
¹¹