Soul mates may have to take a lesson from realists when it comes to love and the success of healthy relationships. Researchers from the University of Toronto published a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, which revealed the importance of how we think about love.“Our findings corroborate prior research showing that people who implicitly think of relationships as perfect unity between soul mates have worse relationships than people who implicitly think of relationships as a journey of growing and working things out,” said the study’s co-author Spike W. S. Lee, professor of marketing at the University of Toronto, in a press release.
By unrealistically romanticizing relationships and giving our partners unattainable standards sets one another up for failure. Simply changing how we perceive love can have the power to either destroy the relationship, or nurture it so that each person is happy. “Apparently, different ways of talking and thinking about love [in a] relationship lead to different ways of evaluating it,” Lee said.
