I think we can now say absolutely fundamentally that the most important aspect of your

mental and physical health, your well-being, your longevity is the relationships you create

with other people because that is sort of tallying alongside quitting smoking and it's much

much stronger for example than maintaining a healthy weight. So it's actually in a way

the missing health phenomenon because we in the way we take our

relationships for granted you know we do all those things which you're told to be

healthy like you know drink lots of water eat the right food exercise all those

sorts of things but nobody actually, do you know what,

just go out and have a lovely cup of tea with a friend.

Well, that is the voice of Anna Machen.

She's an evolutionary anthropologist. love, she says, is integral to our health and happiness.

This is the Lizel Well-being show, the podcast helping us all have a better second half.

I'm Liz Earl and my mission is to find ways for all of us to thrive in later

life by investing in our health and our well-being today. Now did you do anything to mark Valentine's Day just go on I wonder I remember the excited

anticipation of whether or not I'd received any Valentine's Day cards as a teenager

always miraculously managed to receive at least one I suspect sent by my mother

which is probably why I send it to my own kids don't tell them well no value judgments here

either way you know we all express love in our own ways, and I guess we will have our own definitions of what love is even, to be honest.

It's one of those strange things that we'll talk about as if we're discussing the same thing,

but we'll never really know if we experience it in the same way as anyone else.

For me, I guess love is putting someone ahead of myself or perhaps submitting to losing a little bit of

control over how I feel or behave as love or passion perhaps overtakes rationality and reason, but ultimately it's about feeling very happy.

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