February Book of the Month
Love Happier: The Art and Practice of Relationship
by Magali Peysha
For some couples, Valentine’s Day is a welcome celebration. But for others it highlights long-standing frustrations: feeling unseen, misunderstood, or disconnected despite having a genuine commitment to each other.
Love Happier: The Art and Practice of Relationship helps couples address those frustrations. The author, Magali Peysha, focuses on the practical realities of maintaining closeness in a long-term relationship. The book pairs brief explanations with exercises that help couples identify needs, recognize habitual patterns, and experiment with small changes in how they relate to one another.
💙Love modalities and love styles
Peysha explores the concept that people experience love differently. These ways of experiencing love are referred to as Love Modalities. Some people feel loved most strongly through words. Others respond more to touch, shared time, consistent actions, or physical presence. And problems can arise when partners assume that the way they express love is automatically the way it will be received.
She goes on to pair Love Modalities with Love Styles, which describe what a person values and needs to feel loved. For some, love is closely connected to stability and reliability. For others, it is associated with playfulness, growth, achievement, emotional intensity, or shared purpose. Peysha treats differences in partners’ Love Styles as neutral factors rather than incompatibilities. She offers exercises that help couples identify their own Love Styles and talk about them openly.
✨Daily practices
A recurring theme in Love Happier is the importance of small, repeatable actions. Peysha outlines a set of daily practices often referred to as the Fantastic Five. These include giving meaningful compliments, maintaining basic politeness, sharing a daily kiss with attention, greeting one another intentionally after time apart, and stating commitment regularly.
These practices are deliberately simple and emphasize consistency rather than novelty, with the idea that repeated moments of attention help maintain emotional connection over time.
📅Dates and shared time
Peysha encourages couples to schedule regular dates. These dates are framed as protected time set aside for connection. Her suggestions range from walks and shared meals to simple activities at home. The focus is on re-creating the quality of attention that often exists early in a relationship and bringing it into the present.
🔀Many roles within one relationship
Another organizing idea in the book is that long-term relationships contain multiple roles. Partners may relate as lovers, friends, parents, collaborators, or caregivers, sometimes all at once. Peysha invites couples to consider which parts of their relationship feel supported and which feel neglected. This perspective helps couples address specific areas of strain without assuming that their entire relationship is failing.
🌧️When relationships feel difficult
Love Happier also addresses common challenges such as jealousy, financial stress, differences in parenting, and resistance to emotional closeness. Rather than focusing on blame, Peysha encourages clarity about needs, honest conversation, and small behavioral shifts that can change the tone of a relationship.
🧠Use in therapy and coaching
Although the book is geared towards couples or half of a couple, therapists and coaches may find it useful as a structured resource. The concepts are easy to introduce in session, and the exercises provide concrete between-session practices. For clients who benefit from clear prompts and written reflection, the book can support therapeutic work by helping couples test new patterns and return with specific observations.
🌱February takeaway
Love Happier: The Art and Practice of Relationship suggests that celebrations like Valentine’s Day are most meaningful when they reflect an ongoing, intentional approach to a couple’s bond. While a romantic holiday can amplify feelings of love and connection, it is the small, repeated choices couples make that sustain that intimacy over time.
Love Happier: The Art and Practice of Relationship is available as an eBook through the Milton H. Erickson Foundation Bookstore.
✍️ About the author
Magali Peysha is a published author and relationship coach who has helped thousands of people strengthen connection and communication in their personal lives and in coaching relationships. She is co-author of The Strategic Intervention Handbook and the founder of The Relationship Coaching Academy, where she has trained over 10,000 life coaches. Her work emphasizes practical, heart-centered approaches to relational change and reflection.
You may also like …
The Art & Practice of Relationship
by Magali Peysha
Type: Softcover
With the right map, it only takes one person to change a relationship for the better. Your love life can be transformed in as little as ten minutes a day by adding new powerful patterns. This simple, direct approach will activate the lover inside you. Discover how much happier you can be.
An innovative new voice in the field of relationship coached. Learn and grow with these creative relationship strategies.
— Tony Robbins
Seriously, Magali is a genius coach! My heart just melts and heals everytime I hear her teach coaching strategies.
— Susana
I saw the beauty and the love that Magali is shining from the heart. She sees through the soul. Years of therapy couldn’t do that. And I felt my inner child
be happy finally.
— Tara
Magali is one of the calmest, kindest and most powerful expressions of female energy I have ever felt. She approaches issues with a sense of patient purpose to bring out the best in people. By using the language of the heart, she surpasses all imposed beliefs and brings out the true gentle power lying dormant in each of us.
— Ivan
These really simple techniques move so much forward! They have helped me, my relationship with my husband, my children, and my coaching.
MAGALI PEYSHA
— Anne Marie
Magali has helped thousands of people find and build the romantic relationship they want. She is the bestselling author of the Strategic Intervention Handbook, founder of The Relationship Coaching Academy, and has trained over 10,000 Life Coaches. Dedicated to empowering others, she specializes in a creative, heart-centered method. She has been married to her college sweetheart Mark Peysha for twenty-five years, and they have five wonderful children together.
by Bert Hellinger
Type: Softcover
Love’s Hidden Symmetry is a book to be read slowly … and then to be read again and again. Here is an opportunity to discover the work of Bert Hellinger, whose generative approach to intervening in systems has already reached across Europe into the hearts and minds of a diverse therapeutic community.
A lively blend of narrative, storytelling, transcript material, and poetic imagery is invoked to describe, and to demonstrate, what Hellinger calls “the orders of love” and how disturbances in the orders of love create a legacy that must be reckoned with for generations to come. But these deeply embedded forces in the family system can be harnessed for healing once they are acknowledged, respected, and gently redirected.
Hellinger’s basic tool for helping family members restore balance is the use of family constellations. Hellinger, along with coauthors Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont, clarifies how this method can be refined and expanded to galvanize the energy of everyone involved toward a greater sense of well- being. The transcripts included in the book help to capture the extraordinary potential of working appropriately with family constellations. The profound suffering of many of these individuals is more than matched by the opportunity for peace that is revealed in the therapeutic work.
Love’s Hidden Symmetry offers profound – and practical — revelations about What Makes Love Work in Relationships.
Provocative, yes. Candid, yes. Controversial, yes. Filled with hope – emphatically, yes.
A Matter of Choice - Not Fate
William and Carleen Glasser, authors of several books including Choice Theory, teach couples that relationships are a matter of choice not fate. They teach how to use the solving circle, help couples understand basic needs in a relationship, identify seven deadly habits, and show how to choose solutions over problems.
30 Days to a Positive Addiction
by Jeffrey K. Zeig, PhD, and Joan Neehall, PhD
Drs Zeig and Neehall are renowned psychologists and prolific authors. Sharing a passion for helping people to initiate real change in their lives in order to forge more joyful, healthy lifestyles, these truly unique voices come together to create an essential roadmap. Early endorsements…
“30 Days to a Positive Addiction is a wise, practical, effective program that can literally change your life in a month.”- Daniel G. Amen, Author of Memory Rescue and Change Your Brain, Change Your Life
“Reading this book is like having the authors as trusted and informed friends leading you step-by-step on the path to greater happiness. Of course, you have to do the work, but the quizzes and exercises are fun. Along with achieving new, positive, life-affirming habits, you’re going to learn more about yourself than you can possibly imagine. – Harriet Lerner, Author of The Dance of Anger and Why Won’t you Apologize?
“If you’ve ever felt as if you’ve been spinning your wheels and going nowhere fast, this book will give you the traction you need to transform your life! In this refreshingly down-to-earth and enlightening book, Zeig and Neehall challenge us to break free from destructive habits that prevent us from getting the most out of life, and harness this energy to create new, more productive ways of thinking and behaving. Their step-by-step, 30-day program for learning how to replace enervating behaviors with life-sustaining ones both instructs and inspires. This book is a must-read for anyone wanting more joy in life.” – Michele Weiner-Davis; www.DivorceBusting.com
“I love the idea of ‘positive addictions’ taking the place of the negative addictions we treat every day.”-John Gottman, Author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
“Jeff Zeig’s knowledge, empathy, intelligence, and innovative approach to supporting human beings in their challenges are unrivaled. This book with Joan Neehall – its insights and wise guidance – has the power to both support and evolve the recovery movement itself. Each page is drenched with healing opportunities.”-Alanis Morrisette
About the Authors
Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D., is the Founder and Director of the Milton H. Erickson Foundation. He has edited, co-edited, authored, or coauthored more than 20 books on psychotherapy that appear in 14 languages. Dr. Zeig is the architect of The Evolution of Psychotherapy Conferences, which are considered the most important conferences in the history of psychotherapy. He organizes the Brief Therapy Conferences, the Couples Conferences, and the International Congresses on Ericksonian Approaches to Hypnosis and Psychotherapy. A psychologist and marriage and family therapist in private practice in Phoenix, Arizona, Dr. Zeig conducts workshops internationally (40 countries). He is president of Zeig, Tucker & Theisen, Inc., publishers in the behavioral sciences.
Joan Neehall, Ph.D., is a certified clinical psychologist with a specialization in forensic psychology. She is a fellow of the American College of Forensic Examiners, and has worked in the field since 1984. She is the author of Perfecting Your Private Practice (2004), and Women Who Roar: Female Pioneers in Alberta (2011). She conducts workshops and seminars across Western Canada, and maintains practices in Alberta and British Columbia, where she also provides clinical supervision to psychologists. Dr. Neehall is the creator of a television series that focused on stress management, depression, and body image issues (Access, 1998).
