2 ‘Love Skills’ That Can Repair Any Relationship, By A Psychologist

InnovationScience2 ‘Love Skills’ That Can Repair Any Relationship, By A PsychologistByMark Travers,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about relationships, personality, and everyday psychology.Follow AuthorMay 17, 2026, 05:00pm EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Love may start with feelings, but research suggests long-term relationships survive through two emotional skills practiced every single day.gettyLove is often represented as a feeling or emotion that you passively experience, but this is simply untrue. Love is a ‘doing’ word. It’s a verb. A set of actions. A pattern of attention, repair and effort repeated over time. In other words, it’s a skill you actively develop.Couples who treat love as something they either “have” or “don’t have” are usually the ones who end up saying things like, “I don’t know where it went wrong,” or “I’m not sure what, but something just… changed.” And in most cases, the feeling of love isn’t what changed — at least not at first. More likely, the act of love has.Love, like anything you deem valuable in your life, requires some degree of protection. Passion and chemistry can certainly help sustain a relationship early on, but they’ll only take you so far; neither is powerful enough on its own to carry love indefinitely. What determines the health of a relationship over time is how two people behave when things are ordinary. It comes down to how you handle tension, misunderstandings and boredom.Here are two such skills that can take a relationship from struggling to flourishing, according to psychological research.1. Communication SkillsJust about everyone knows that communication is one of the most important aspects of a romantic relationship. It’s one of those buzzwords repeated so often that it starts to lose meaning. Yet ironically, ask anyone what good communication actually entails, and the...