difficult time sustaining and cultivating over the last 50 to 75 years. relationships are characterized by the luxury of coming into a friends house and being able to open a refrigerator without asking and help yourself to the food while you have casual conversation. you have to have a kind of close relationship with that person in order to have the right to do that, and that is the kind of relationship that we were interested in and focused on and talked about in this book. >> we became convinced first of all the these kinds of close relationships were becoming more challenging for americans to sustain and cultivate. i became involved in the project in terms of trying to research and see whether there was any research evidence to support. the more i researched, the

more involved and passion that i became. we ran across all kinds of interesting things. if you go back to the sociology journals, we found an article where sociologists documented that about half of the people who got married in 1940 in a couple of major metropolitan areas grew up within ten blocks of each other. 75 percent of the people who got married corrupt within 20 blocks of each other. american other. american life has really changed since then. people used to be embedded in the geographical community, a physical space where they were in contact with each other on a regular basis. today if you survey people getting married there are members of multiple communities, members of virtual communities, communities, and there are members of a hometown

college community. american life has changed, and that community stability was something will was well was interested in. we documented through discovering this kind of research that the social factors have sabotaged our ability to support these kinds of close refrigerator rights kinds of relationships. what we discovered was nobility and american culture really sabotages these relationships. at the time the statistics were 43 to 45 million americans. that kind of relocation takes toll on relational health. we are having to take these relational hits. we believe americans do not

really consider the relational risks to the extent that they are to in terms of taking off in and around. remove all kinds of reasons. we have probably taken this too lightly. we got got into the mobility statistics, look at how things change, look at studies that came out of duke and north carolina which indicated the last 25 years, 25 years ago 13% of the people surveyed said that they did not have anybody that they could confide in. twenty-five years later later the statistic is 25 percent. they have no one. we became convinced that more and more americans were suffering from the lack of

these close interpersonal refrigerator rights kinds of relationships. that was another ingredient that i got into. the consequences in terms of physical health, emotional health, overall well-being. i well-being. i became a believer. i ran across studies by david spiegel of stanford university you did research with breast cancer patients and did a simple experiment where some of the women with breast cancer talked weekly in the group about their situation, life, sharing stories, and stories, and other women did not have that opportunity. he first wrote about this by saying the women who were talking once a week felt better about life. emotions were higher, more more optimistic, they felt good. the real kicker came when he

discovered the people who had met weekly were twice as likely. published a piece in the harvard medical journals back in the late 1990s and had been working with people who had heart attacks and discover that of a heart attack patients, those who could not identify that they had at least one person who they could confide in,, share there life stories with them problems and so forth, those people were twice as likely to be dead years later. the. the statistic, twice as likely. we talked. if cbs news announced it was

a drug that can make your survival rate twice as great it would be headlines. epidemic levels of anxiety and depression and will and i believe that one of the major contributors to the is our challenge that we have found ourselves in. people who are well connected get sick less often. they heal faster, and we are not just talking about common colds. severe injuries, heart attacks, cancer. that. that evidence boggled my mind. i was not aware. the the media part of this became very important because over this time there has been a a revolution in the way we use media,, and in general an important aspect of that is how media has contributed to increasing isolation.

at one level we are connected with other people and away we have never been before, but when you talk about those close face-to-face type of relationships where we are in physical contact with each other, each other, each of his presence and can cultivate that strong emotional bond, media may have an isolated dynamic. we we are spending more and more time looking at screens that we are at other people. and so we write about that in the book as well. mobility and media, we articulate. the first big step is for people to become conscious of the factors that are at work that makes these

relationships more challenging. when people move around they ought to think about the relational consequences of the moves. when you are moving, think about your relational health wherever you are and what you have to do to surround yourself with this extended network of relationships that feel like family. it does not have to actually be family, but you can build your own family with your network of relationships. if you look at what happened to us, it is hard to see that these major factors are going to dissipate in any way. these are going to be a continuing part of american life. ultimately we were optimistic because we believe people are wired. we need each other. over time we will find ways to integrate technology in a

way that serves as well. obviously smart phones are vital. we will find ways to integrate technology and adapt. we cannot do that unless we are sensitized to what role the technology is playing. >> plan on staying in touch? >> a lot easier now. facebook, testing, so we will see each other through that and hopefully p.m. to half. >> for more information on the recent visit to lafayette and west lafayette indiana and the many other cities go to c-span.org/local content. >> as 2014 comes to a close

from february 12 12th through the 15th, the savanna book festival will be held in savannah, georgia the seventh annual tucson festival of books hosted by the university of maryland chief of arizona. .. >> over the past half century, nexn booktv. it's about an hour.