Radically Renovate All of Your Relationships in 2.25 Hours

With your parents, cat, Bumble prospects, kids, friends and even mankind

Breaking news: The longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done has produced a conclusion: “Good relationships lead to health and happiness,” as Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, put it in The Atlantic this month.

Sounds like something that could have been predicted in 1938, when the study started, but the ways of highly precise longitudinal studies are mysterious.

My only remaining question is whether the downer clinical word “relationships” can be trusted with all of human happiness.

First, call it love.

It’s time. And that’s how C.S. Lewis does it. And retire “relationships” — that officious mouthful borrowed from the object world, in which a relationship is properly “north” or “tangential.” Switch it out for love. Once you listen to Lewis expound on his cherished four-letter word in the most uproariously accented Oxbridge-Ulster English you’ve ever heard, you’ll wonder what took you so long. To this end, I assign you Lewis’s “Four Loves” lecture, a 1960 radio performance by the man himself, which unspools on mp3 for just over two and a quarter hours.