What Makes Our Relationships Meaningful, Satisfying, or Fulfilling?

This book features a unique research project: it spans fifty years. It seeks to replicate in 2025 findings from research in 1975 asking this question: What makes our relationships meaningful, satisfying, or fulfilling? Look for answers from the expertise of social scientists and the wisdom of ordinary people. The original research centers on four relational qualities: communication openness, being oneself, interpersonal security and warmth, and personal support and growth. The new research replicates three of these qualities and identifies ten themes, seven of which are new: communication, being oneself, and growth along with connection, mutuality, enjoyment, time, work, presence, and transcendence. A follow-up research project discovers that ordinary people's relationships as a whole are meaningful, satisfying, fulfilling, and quite healthy overall. In fact, they have significance, value, and importance; they bring enjoyment, pleasure, or contentment; and they thrive and flourish. Perhaps most astonishingly, in their personal relationships, they do well on all four qualities and ten themes, including practical ways each quality and theme is expressed. Within the book, readers will also find thought-provoking quotations, vignettes, reflections, and case studies drawn from responses of family members, friends, and colleagues.