Professor Bob Waldinger

Yes.

Well, I totally agree with what George says there.

Because one of the ways we can protect ourselves psychologically is to push people away.

If we're afraid of people, if we're worried about being disliked, being disapproved of, if we're worried about somebody hurting us, we can put up barriers.

And you've probably seen this.

You've probably seen it in yourself sometimes.

Yeah, yeah.

And what we see is that the people who do that their whole lives really are pushing love away.

And that means you could even be in a marriage, but it could be a very distant marriage.

And many people never find a romantic partner.

Not that you have to find a romantic partner because you could have friends, really good friendships.

That's fine.

It's the people who are scared to let themselves express love.

and express affection, who often keep love at a distance, and they're less happy and less healthy.

Well, it's a really hard thing to study, actually.

But the way we did it

was we interviewed people and we said, tell us about a difficult time you've had recently and how did you cope?

And usually we'd ask them about a few difficult times.

And then what we would do is we would get researchers to, we would just take the stories and we'd show them the stories and we'd say, what coping mechanisms are being used here?

And people were really able to rate whether someone was like burying their head in the sand saying, I'm not going to deal with this stressor.