Dr. Robert Waldinger

And think about the people who have to raise kids on their own, or even two separated people who are raising their kids separately, in essence.

First of all, it's economically often very disastrous to the family, and it's much harder.

So if you can...

be in a relationship where you can build things, then you can achieve more of the goals that you want to achieve as a family.

On the other hand, to stay in a relationship that's absolutely miserable and acrimonious, there's research that showed that staying in a really terrible relationship is probably worse for you than going your separate ways.

And when we say worse for you, what does that mean?

Well, actually, literally worse for your health and certainly for your happiness.

But that's different.

It depletes your health.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Because one of the things... Isn't that mad?

It depletes your health.

Oh, yeah.

I get the happiness, but your health.

So it's stress, right?

Yeah.

what we find, why do relationships improve our, good relationships improve our health?

We think a lot of it has to do with there being stress reducers.

There being what we call in my world, emotion regulators.