Thank you for joining us for episode 404 of Live Happy Now.

It's Valentine's Day, and as the rest of the world focuses on romantic notions, we're going to get real.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm sitting down with marriage and family therapist, Michelle Be Becker to talk about how we can become

more compassionate in our relationships. Michelle developed the Compassion for Couples Program

is co-founder of the teacher training program at the Center for Mindful Self-compassion

and a senior teacher of compassion cultivation training. She also hosts the well-connected podcast and is author

of Compassion for Couples, Building the Skills of Loving Connection. Today, she shares with us some of the

key ways that practicing compassion can transform our relationships, and then she gives us some

tips for getting started. Let's have a listen.

Michelle, welcome to Live Happy Now. Thank you. Happy to be here, Paula. Thanks for inviting me.

Well, it's Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day. Thank you. You too? Yeah, this is a time when we are

absolutely inundated with all these images of romantic love and grand gestures.

And that's why I wanted to talk to you because it's not always that way.

And I wanted to talk to you about the side that gets overlooked.

And that's this more mature part of the relationship, this later phase of love.

So to kick it off, can you talk about how this stage, this later stage of romance and love,

is so much different than the love we have when we're falling in love?

Yeah, I think it might help actually to talk about what happens when we fall in love

and then how we progress to that mature love.

So in this falling in love phase, we are actually dosed with chemicals like

oxytocin. And what happens is that prevents us. We have this sort of not all of us, but often,

this sense of being on cloud nine. Like, oh, he's so wonderful. She's so wonderful, they're so wonderful, right?

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