Where the numbers come from

Home · The Framework

“Your relationships are the number one predictor of a long, happy life.”

From the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed the same people since 1938 and is one of the longest studies of adult life ever run. Looking for what predicted who would still be thriving at 80, the researchers expected cholesterol, blood pressure and BMI. The clearest predictor turned out to be how satisfied people were with their close relationships at 50.

• Harvard Gazette on the study's findings
• The study itself, from its director

Home · The Framework

“Zero classes on relationships in 13 years of school.”

No US state requires a course on relationships. Twenty-seven states do require instruction about healthy relationships, but it sits inside sex education or a health unit rather than existing as a subject of its own, and the amount of it varies enormously by state and district. The gap this names is the absence of the subject, not the absence of the words.

• Center for American Progress · sex education standards across the states
• Education Commission of the States · what health classrooms are required to teach

Our Story

“When people never learn how relationships work, the harm ripples outward into loneliness, intimate-partner violence, and childhood trauma, a cycle that repeats across generations.”

Three separate bodies of evidence. The US Surgeon General issued a 2023 advisory calling loneliness and isolation an epidemic, with health effects it compares to smoking. The CDC documents that childhood exposure to violence raises the likelihood of experiencing or causing it later, and that a caregiver's adverse childhood experiences predict their child's, which is the generational part. The CDC's own prevention guidance names relationship-skills education in schools as a response.

• US Surgeon General · Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (2023)
• CDC · About Adverse Childhood Experiences