What makes a man fall a little harder for his beloved each day?

Is it everything she does for him? The way she looks? Those killer chocolate brownies?

No doubt those could all help, but there is one quality that trumps them all:

Appreciation.

That’s the conclusion of University of North Carolina social psychology professor Sara Algoe, anyway.

Dr. Algoe is a strong proponent of gratitude, claiming that it forms the foundation of our relationships:

“Feelings of gratitude and generosity are helpful in solidifying our relationships with people we care about.”[1]

Just think about what happens to relationships when one or both people take each other for granted.

You hear it all the time: “He expects me to do everything for him.” “She doesn’t appreciate how much I do.”

Appreciation goes a long way towards helping us feel acknowledged for the work we put into a relationship.

Dr. Algoe suggests that expressing gratitude towards your partner can help him behave more lovingly towards you.

“Whenever you have an interaction with your romantic partner,” she says, “that feeling you have when you walk away sets the stage for the next interaction with that person.”[2]

In other words, when he feels appreciated by you, he feels appreciative of you.

This is an easy idea to test for yourself. Simply tell your partner how much you appreciate something about him. Then see if you can tell a difference in his behavior.

But before you do, let me show you something weird about the way men respond to appreciation. Otherwise, your appreciation can backfire.

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Imagine you’ve gone to L.A. on business. Nothing exciting. Just a conference in one of those soulless hotels near the airport.

You sneak a moment away and find a coffee shop. You just want to sit for a moment, relax, and take in that SoCal vibe.

As you’re sitting there, you see a man walk in.

Your jaw drops open. It couldn’t be! Is it? It is.

It’s the guy you watch every week on your TV screen. Your favorite celeb crush of all time!

He strides up to the counter, orders a coffee, and looks around him. Then he sees you.

His eyes widen. He freezes.

Oh no, you think. You’ve spilled something on your top. You glance down, hoping to sort out whatever he’s spotted before you embarrass yourself even further.

But when you look up, he’s at your table. Introducing himself. Asking if he could sit down.

Two hours later, you’ve missed all your meetings but could care less. He wants your phone number. He wants to know how he can see you again.

All love affairs start with magic.

Meeting each other out of the blue. Seeing each other as if for the first time. A shudder of unbearable excitement.

In that giddy swirl of love, lust and hope, it’s impossible to imagine you’ll ever feel differently about him.

If anything, you’re sure your love will grow even stronger. You’ll never be able to look at this man and not swoon in happiness. Being with him for the rest of your life would be like buying a winning lottery ticket. A lifetime of joy and bliss.

But here’s what researchers have discovered…

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Scientists come up with the craziest ideas.

Ever wondered if you and your pet have some sort of psychic link?

Turns out you do … only it’s not psychic so much as electromagnetic.

And it’s the same link you have with your significant other, only it’s more easily measured in animals.

One day, the director of the HeartMath Institute, Dr. Rollin McCraty, invited his 12-year-old son and his dog to the lab.

He fitted the two of them with electrocardiogram recorders, which record heart rhythms.

He asked his son to sit down in a chair and ignore the dog completely. The boy wasn’t supposed to interact with his pet in any way.

Instead, the boy focused on feeling into his heart and radiating love and appreciation for his pet, an exercise called a “Heart Lock-In.”

Not only did the boy’s heartbeat slow and become more rhythmic, but the dog’s heartbeat became synchronized with its owner’s—at the exact time the boy was doing the Heart Lock-In.

Then the boy got up and left the room. The dog’s heart rate spiked and became erratic. It was no longer linked with the boy’s.

This experiment was no one-off. It was later repeated with a woman and her horses. Again, when the woman was consciously radiating love for her pets, the animals’ heart rates synchronized with hers.

Researchers found evidence of this “heart-to-heart communication” between people when they were (1) sleeping together, (2) watching a loved one do something dangerous (in this case, firewalking), or (3) consciously practicing heart coherence techniques like the Heart Lock-In.

So something happens between you and your loved ones—whether they be human or animal—when you’re physically close and consciously focusing on the love you feel for them.

But what’s going on?

The HeartMath Institute was founded to explore that question. It investigates how we use the power of the heart to improve our health, our relationships, and our world.

And what it found is that the heart generates a powerful electromagnetic field that extends several feet beyond the body. (That field is 5000 times greater than the field produced by the brain.)

When people touch each other, they exchange some of that electromagnetic energy.

And there’s information in that energy we can read.

For example, when a mother holds her baby and places all her attention on her child, her brain waves synchronize to the baby’s heartbeat. She’s literally reading her baby’s electromagnetic signals—but she doesn’t have a clue she’s doing it.

Now here’s the really exciting part:

By consciously cultivating positive emotions, you can affect your heart’s electromagnetic field. You can make it smoother and more rhythmic.

And when you do that, everyone in your presence feels the difference…

Because they’re in contact with your heart’s electromagnetic field.

Their heart rate may not synchronize to yours, if they’re strangers or people who aren’t really close to you, but they’ll feel the difference.

So your emotions are more than just feelings you have inside.

They’re energy broadcast by your heart, and they physically affect other people.

You might be wondering…

How can you use this information to improve your relationships?

How can you get in sync with your loved one, just as the boy and his pet did in the example that opened this article?

It takes just three simple steps.

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Do you ever wonder what would be different in your life if you hadn’t dated the men you’ve dated? Do relationships actually change who we are?

If you’re a fan of the TV show Parks and Recreation, you may remember Ann’s dating adventures in the third season. She decided to just have fun and date a bunch of different people. So far so good.

But with every new boyfriend, she started behaving differently. At one point she showed up at Leslie’s office wearing a literal cowboy outfit. Eventually, Leslie (being a good friend) told her she was going overboard, changing too much to accommodate the guys she spent time with.

But that’s a TV show. That’s not real, is it?

A recent study suggests it may be closer to the truth than you’d think. Researchers from the University of Connecticut wanted to understand what happens to couples when one half of the couple loses weight.

Turns out, if one person decides to shed some pounds, their partner tends to follow suit—even if the partner doesn’t intentionally go on a diet! “The concept is called the ripple effect,” Amy Gorin, Associate Professor in Psychological Sciences, said. If you get healthier, your guy is likely to get healthier, too.

You already know where this is headed. The opposite also happens. If one person adopts bad habits, so does the other.

We’re heavily influenced by the people around us. Especially the people we date. And we have the power to influence them right back.

That’s a hard pill to swallow for some. It can be uncomfortable to accept that other people change who you are. But I want to encourage you to lean into this truth instead of pushing back against it.

If you accept that you have a lot of influence over your man and he has a lot of influence over you, you can use that fact in some pretty powerful ways. It can even make you a stronger couple.

Want to know how? I can tell you.

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