It’s now a firmly established fact that loving attachments are an important component of good health. According to dozens of epidemiological studies, people in long-term relationships are significantly less likely to suffer from cancer, viral infections, mental illness, pneumonia, and dementia. They have fewer surgeries, car accidents, and heart attacks. Their wounds heal faster and they have a lower risk of auto-immune diseases.

Consider the results from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been tracking 268 Harvard men since the late 1930s. While the study set out to identify the medical measurements that could predict health outcomes—they tracked everything from the circumference of the chest to the hanging length of the scrotum—none of the data proved useful. Instead, what George Vaillant and other scientists discovered after tracking the men for nearly seven decades is that “the capacity for love turns out to be a great predictor of mortality.” For instance, those men in the “loveless” category—they had the fewest attachments—were three times more likely to be diagnosed with a mental illness and five times more likely to be “unusually anxious.” The loneliest men were also ten times more likely to suffer from a chronic illness before the age of fifty-two and three times more likely to become heavy users of alcohol and tranquilizers.

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