Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study by Vaillant George E

Author:Vaillant, George E. [Vaillant, George E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: 2012-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

* The total N in Table 6.2 is 159 rather than the 242 in Table 6.1 due to the exclusion of the 73 so-so marriages, the 7 never married, and 3 missing data.

Of course we were very interested in adult sexual adjustment, but it didn’t take long for the Study staff to notice that a questionnaire that delved too inquisitively into the men’s sex lives was a questionnaire with a very low return rate. Over the years, therefore, the only information we systematically gathered on this subject were responses to a simplistic and rather ritualized question: Did a man perceive his sexual adjustment as “very satisfying,” “satisfying,” “not as good as wished,” or “poor”?

What we found was that overt fear of sex was a far more powerful predictor of poor mental health than sexual dissatisfaction in marriage was. After all, marital sexual adjustment depends heavily upon the partner, but fear of sex is closely linked with a personal mistrust of the universe. The men who experienced lifelong poor marriages were six times as likely as men with excellent marriages, and twice as likely as men who divorced, to give evidence on questionnaires of being fearful or uncomfortable about sexual relations. Yet there were many good marriages in which sexual adjustment was less than ideal after the couple reached age sixty. We can’t yet say much about why, or about what role biology may play.

Apart from that I don’t have much of interest to report on the men’s sex lives, except for one oddity of exactly the sort that makes lifetime studies so unpredictable and so fascinating.

At age eighty-five, we asked the men when they had last engaged in sexual intercourse. Only sixty-two (about two-thirds) of the men responded; of those 30 percent were still sexually active. In that small sample, the predictors of sustained sexual activity were: good health at sixty and seventy, good overall adjustment after (but not necessarily before) age sixty-five, and an absence of vascular risk factors. Surprisingly, the variables I thought would protect against early impotence—ancestral longevity, maturity of defenses, physical health at age eighty, and quality of marriage—showed no significant effect.

But I empirically defined a composite variable called cultural and impractical, summing five “touchy-feely” traits that had not been considered promising back in 1938—Creative/intuitive, Cultural, Ideational, Introspective, and Sensitive affect—and then subtracting from them the two practical traits that had largely been seen as laudable—Pragmatic and Practical/organizing. I chose these items because they correlated at least weakly with prolonged sexual activity. The result was not only very significantly correlated with a long sex life, but it also allowed a startling and dramatic separation of the Grant Study men by politics (more on this in Chapter 10, and on the curious association of the men’s political beliefs with sustained sexual activity).

DIVORCE REVISITED

Thirty-five years ago I was largely wrong about the importance of divorce. It is clear to me now that divorce does not necessarily reflect an inability to achieve Eriksonian Intimacy or even to enjoy great relational closeness.

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