What Makes A Relationship Successful?
The magic ingredients of love
I recently had a chance to spend some time with my dad. We talked a lot about everything, but one of the most meaningful conversations we had was about love. My dad has a theory that a relationship can only be successful when these four elements are present:
- emotional connection
- sexual chemistry
- intellectual connection
- spiritual alignment
“When you come across someone who is compatible with you on all four of these”, he said, “you’ve found the one”. I can see how this makes sense to him, but I believe that the chances of finding one person who marks off every checkbox are very slim. And I am personally capable of having successful relationships with people who match a subset of these categories.
Yes, when I married my husband, we had a great level of compatibility across all four. However, as time went by, we grew and changed, and our needs evolved. We became less spiritually aligned, for example, yet our emotional connection has deepened. Despite these changes, I still love him dearly, definitely more than I did over a decade ago.
Another reason my dad’s theory is slightly idealistic is this — within each of the four ingredients, there is a spectrum of…
