Hags Come Visiting
What They Call Fun Might Extend Their Lives
I expected more dancing in my life, though not in my garden. I knew we’d stay up late drinking, telling stories, and laughing. I anticipated the guitar and lovely voices during dinner duties.
The self-described Hags, friends of ours since we met in college in the 1980s, have been gathering for more than 25 years across the west, and my wife, Janet, and I knew that these “fun hogs” would bring a week of joy to our western Massachusetts home when we invited them in the summer of 2018.
What I did not anticipate when we cleared away the beer cans and drove the last few to Logan International Airport was that these women, who first met on an Ultimate field among the Redwood trees of a far northern California university campus, may have presented all of us a way to live longer and be happier doing it.
Days after these women and their spouses and boyfriends left, I still felt as if I was on vacation, more willing to forgive, more grateful, more alert to my neighbors. It could have been the left-over feelings of having friends visit, a hang-over of the best kind.
But researchers say that what these women do naturally — connect, talk, bond despite the distance of years and miles — can improve the lives of people who are part of them. And now making deep friendship groups is being taught explicitly in other parts of the country as a life-enhancing project.
These 15 women, who live from Alaska to California to Massachusetts, have formed, without intending to, what researchers into happiness and longevity call a “moari,” a Japanese term pronounced “Mo-Eye” for a friendship group that helps individuals when times are difficult and benefit when times are flush. What’s more, according to recent research, these groups can even foster positive behaviors in its members — and, according to me, those married to its members.
Dan Buettner, who wrote about human longevity in his book The Blue Zones: Lessons For Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, points out that the people of Okinawa, a Japanese island where residents live longer than most of the rest of us, form these social groups, and, along with diet and exercise, it is an important reason for their long lives.
