Why should we care about love and loving relationships?

Research has found that great friendships and love relationships result in greater health, wealth and resilience. People even recover faster from illness when they feel loved. Another perk of o loving relationship is longevity – you will live longer if you are in a happy relationship. Another automatic result of a loving home, is that stronger and more resilient children.

Once couples become mindful about using their partner’s language, it can become like a second language. When this happens, they can meet each other’s needs and feel loved.

However, if there is one ingredient of love that can become like a wand, it is the fact that love has a kind of MAGIC.

In the movie Sleepless in Seattle, Tom Hanks is asked: What is so special about your wife?

To which he replied: I knew it the first time I touched her. It was like magic.

Science can help us find the magic of love.

You need three things to get to this MAGIC:

PHYSIOLOGICAL CALM – when people are calm, they can listen, take in information and have access to humour, wisdom and other emotional strengths
TRUST is something that can be measured –
- Trusting relationships lead to intimacy and great sex;
  Untrusting relationships are lonely;
- Researchers found that affairs are not a search for sex but come out of loneliness in a relationship. From many interviews the two-timing partner reveals that he or she fell for the so-called third person because this person found him or her interesting and was willing to talk to the mor listen to them.
- Mutual trust is built when both partners maximise the benefits for both of them. Once you can see the situation through the other one’s eyes, you sincerely have your partner in your head and not only yourself.
  When there is mutual trust in a marriage, a husband could react as follows:
  “I can walk into a kitchen now, after thirty years of marriage, and view that kitchen the way my wife would see it. So I can say to myself – she would be upset by that, so I clean it up.
  This reminded me that my father told me decades ago that he washed the dishes he used before going to work when my mother wasn’t around because he knew that it would upset her if he left them in the sink for her to clean. My parents went through a lot together. They made it seem like it was the only thing to do.
COMMITMENT is the final component of the Magic triangle. Committed couples cherish their partners, show gratitude for what they have and see their love relationship as a safe haven where loyalty reigns. Either partner would think and say: “This is my journey. This is the love of my life. I am lucky to have this person.”