This is on point. I'm Deborah Becker in for Magnichau-Bardi. Today we're helping start the new year with stories of meaningful relationships.

I am almost 61 and I have a group of friends. We have been together since we were 12 and we see each

each other at least once a year. Now that we're older we see each other two, three, four times a year and we have been there through obviously high school, college,

marriage, children, divorce, death, our aging parents, and we are just each other's rocks best friends sisters and

couldn't live without them. I grew up the seventh of nine children on a farm

near Niagara Falls, New York.

My most vital social influence has been my eight brothers and sisters.

Our most important activity has been singing together all nine of us. My three brothers and I also had our own barber shop quartet.

I have a friend who we have been friends since 1961.

We were born in 1959,

so we don't really remember not knowing each other and I cannot give words to how I

could never have managed this life alone.

And truthfully, the thing I worry about most in life

is which one of us was going to go first,

because the other one will be completely undone.

Those are on-point listeners, Paul Osweini from Seattle, Ronald Harrington from Ventura, California,

and Sue Seabert from Montrose, Colorado. Their stories might make all of us consider what makes

us healthiest and happiest in life. Well, Harvard researchers have been trying to scientifically answer that question since at least

1938, when two studies began following the lives of 268 undergraduate students at Harvard

and another group of 456 boys from disadvantaged

families in Boston. These two efforts later merged into what's now called

the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

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