Life Topic: Love & relationships

How open are you to giving and receiving love, particularly in close relationships, and start to connect deeper without emotional barriers?

About this Life Topic

Your phone lights up with a message from a friend who is going through a divorce. You read it, and you think: I will answer this properly tonight, when I have time and the right words. Four days later it is still sitting there, and by now the delay itself has become the thing you feel bad about.

Or it is Sunday afternoon. You and your partner are on the sofa, both scrolling, the room is quiet, and there is a silent uncomfortable energy in the air. 

You love your family, however due to your career and other social obligations you can't find the time to meet with them. Painfully you realize you have been saying this for the last year and a half. 

This topic lives in those places. Not in whether you have people around you, but in what is actually moving between you and them.

It runs in two directions. Giving is the visible half: showing up, remembering an appointment, listening to the same worry for the fourth time without sighing. On the other hand, receiving is the half we rarely notice we are avoiding. Someone offers to drive you to the hospital and you hear yourself say "no, honestly, I'll get the train" before you have even considered it. A colleague says something genuinely kind and you have deflected it with a joke inside two seconds.

Emotional barriers are not defects but old solutions. There was a time when keeping a little distance was the sensible thing to do. Many year later however, the situation ended but the habit stayed on. You can spot it in small things. The friendship that used to be effortless and now needs scheduling. The partner who says you seem far away, and you cannot quite argue with them. The dinner where you were funny and warm for three hours and told nobody anything.

What this Life Topic measures

Love & Relationships looks at how open the channel is in both directions: how freely warmth and attention go out, and how much of what comes back you are able to let in.

It is not a count of friends, and it is not a verdict on how lovable you are. It is a reading of how much protective distance is currently switched on.

Where the number comes from

During a scan, Kalmoa's brain analysis records your brain's activity as a pattern of peaks and troughs, much like the kind you can find in an EEG, Kalmoa recognizes which of the seven life topics each part of that pattern belongs to.

Every relevant peak and trough is given a value and a weight, and those weighted values are added up into one number per Life Topic. We call this the Well-Being Index (WBI).

What the research says

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed the same families since 1938, making it the longest-running study of its kind. Its directors, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, describe the central finding bluntly in The Good Life (2023): the quality of people's close relationships at midlife predicted their health and happiness decades later more reliably than cholesterol levels did.

The reverse also holds. Julianne Holt-Lunstad's meta-analyses of hundreds of thousands of participants place weak social connection alongside well-known physical risk factors in its association with mortality; her work is a large part of why loneliness is now treated as a public health issue rather than a private mood.

On the mechanics of close relationships, John Gottman's observational research pointed to a balance of positive and negative moments, often summarised as roughly five positive interactions to each negative one during conflict. Later reviews have rightly cautioned against treating that number as a formula. The useful part is not the arithmetic; it is the finding that repair matters more than the absence of friction.

And Brené Brown's research on vulnerability adds the piece people most often skip: closeness requires being seen, and being seen feels like exposure before it feels like connection.

Reading your score

A low score [XX–XX%] usually means the protective distance is doing a lot of work right now. That can feel like loneliness in a full room, or like being busy with everyone and close to no one. Often it is the receiving channel in particular that has narrowed.

A middle score [XX–XX%] is the most common place to be, and it often means connection is real but selective. Open with some people, guarded with the rest. Warm at home, armoured at work. Or the other way around.

A high score [XX–XX%] points to you being able to feel open and comfortable around people and relationships.

One thing to watch: over-giving can read as openness. If your score is high but you feel drained, look at this topic alongside Load Bearing, Guarding Limits & Stress.

Why this Life Topic is worth following over time

Relationships bend with circumstance. A newborn, a house move, a demanding quarter, a friend who emigrates: each of these moves the number, and none of them means anything is wrong with you. That is precisely why one measurement says so little and a series says a great deal.

Across a few weeks or months, the difference between a dip and a direction becomes visible. A dip recovers on its own. A direction keeps going, quietly, and is almost impossible to notice from the inside. Kalmoa is there to help provide those insights.

Curious what you would score?