On Valentines Day most couples make fancy dinner reservations, buy lovey-dovey cards and express their appreciation for each other. But what happens on February 15th? One day a year doesn’t make a romantic relationship.

Plus, there are plenty of ways to keep the passion alive all year, which helps to genuinely strengthen your relationship. Below, three experts share their tips for year-round romance.

1. Show your appreciation every day. “From morning until night, couples have the opportunity to offer words of affirmation, appreciation and adoration to one another as well as the chance to offer nonverbal cues as well,” according to psychotherapist Jeffrey Sumber, MA. Nonverbal cues are anything from a wink to a kiss to a smile. Every day Sumber asks himself a question that’s valuable for everyone to ponder: What can I do to celebrate my partner today?

2. Surprise your partner. Small surprises also make the everyday special, according to Barton Goldsmith, Ph.D., a psychotherapist and author of Emotional Fitness for Couples. He suggested leaving a love note on the fridge, in the shower or in your partner’s pocket; leaving a loving or sexy voicemail; or sending a card to work. Sumber recommended breakfast in bed, flowers or even a singing telegram at work.

“’Come to the edge,’ he said. They said: ‘We are afraid.’ ‘Come to the edge,’ he said. They came. He pushed them and they flew.” Guillaume Apollinaire

Why is it that when you are exposed to certain kinds of art you sometimes feel despair, depression, etc. while other types connect you with the sublime? I remember very well having attended various art museum shows and then suddenly sensing great despair and hopelessness as I looked at a series produced by a visiting visual artist. Asking others in the room what they sensed, I found it quite intriguing that they felt the same.

Almost all my life I have been involved in some form with the visual and performing arts, either as a student, an admirer, or even marrying a watercolor artist. It is no surprise that my own children have gone on to become forces of their own in the contemporary art world (http://www.TMSisters.com) being featured in common and trade publications as well as doing shows all over the world. Over the years, being so surrounded by this world, I have developed relationships with visual and performing artists, often serving them as a mentor, coach, or psychotherapist.

In my trek to understand the relationship between emotional states and creative output of the artist, I have seen, what appears to be, a correlation.

I grew up in Batavia, N.Y., about ten miles down the road from the small town of LeRoy. I had just gone off to Cornell a few months before the big train derailment in December, 1970, that spilled cyanide crystals and about 30,000 gallons of the solvent called tricholoroethene onto the railroad bed.

I never imagined that 40 years later, as a psychiatrist, I’d be reading about this incident in connection with one of the most mysterious mass outbreaks of neurological symptoms in recent memory. And yet, this past January, the environmental-activist-cum-movie-star, Erin Brockovich, began investigating a possible connection between that chemical spill and the bizarre outbreak among a group of LeRoy Junior-Senior High School students.

I truly don’t know what explains the strange constellation of signs and symptoms seen in this group of young people. I’m not sure anybody does. Most of the expert opinion has settled on the description of “mass psychogenic illness.”

This guest article from YourTango was written by Maryanne Comaroto. 

Rob, 35, from California asks:

Last year my wife flipped out when I bought her lingerie for Valentine’s Day. The truth is, I still don’t know why. She just got angry and said, “Isn’t it obvious?” and that was it. Any advice on what I get her this year that won’t set her off (and that we both can enjoy), which is what I thought the point of Valentine’s Day was?

Maryanne’s answer:

Rob, that’s a great question. Some guys might have just blown it off and thought, “Hmmm, maybe this year I’ll get her some lingerie in a different color.” Sounds like you’re guessing that is not the answer, unless you like being told off and sexually frustrated.

Valentine’s Day reminds us to celebrate love.

But no matter how much chocolate we eat, how bright our flowers, how much we say that it’s a silly holiday, or how happy or unhappy we are about the state of our relationships, this love celebration often comes with some serious pangs of loneliness.

While we might fantasize that love is a cure for loneliness, and imagine that someday we’ll stop feeling lonely, or that other people don’t feel lonely, the reality is that love and loneliness go hand in hand; when we open our hearts to feel love, we also open our hearts to feel loneliness.

Loneliness does not mean that we are doing something wrong or that there is something wrong with us. Loneliness is not a contagious disease that we can ward off by never being alone or manically pursuing relationships. Loneliness is not a sin. Loneliness does not mean we are ungrateful.

Loneliness is not reserved for single people, depressed people and introverts. Loneliness is a part of every human’s experience, whether we are looking for a partner, married, the life of the party, or a certifiable hermit.

When Valentine’s Day rolls around, there’s pressure to buy or do something swanky or extra-special. And for some partners this spells trouble. Whether you’re stumped on what to get your sweetheart or romantically clumsy (or clueless), these tips from two seasoned relationship experts can help!

1. Know how your partner likes to be loved.

Partners have different needs and find different things appealing. For one partner, a bouquet of flowers is a special gift. For another, flowers are meaningless but a book makes their heart skip a beat. (Honey, if you’re reading this, you know I appreciate both!)

This is where your partner’s “love frame” comes in. This term originated from psychologist George Bach, according to Bill Cloke, Ph.D, a psychologist in private practice in Los Angeles for over 20 years and author of Happy Together: Creating A Lifetime of Connection, Commitment, and Intimacy. It simply refers to how you show love to your partner along with how you feel most loved.

“Knowing what your partner likes to receive when they want to feel loved can create a very special feeling because they sense that you know who they really are and love them for it,” Cloke said.

There’s a cartoon picturing a chicken and an egg in bed together. The chicken is smoking a cigarette with a very satisfied expression on his face, and the egg is restless and disgruntled. The egg finally looks over to the chicken and says, “Well, I guess that answers that question.”

That’s how I think of the relationship between religion and depression: like the chicken and the egg debacle.

I can’t say which came first in my life, because they were both there from the start. And you need only read through a few of the lives of the saints or walk the exhibition aisles at the Religious Booksellers Trade Exhibit to see that holy people aren’t all that happy much of the time.

How is it that we depressives tend to be more spiritual? Or is it that the more religion you get in your life, the more depressed?

As I was sitting around catching up on some mental health news on Saturday, I inadvertently stumbled upon another manufactured news cycle about the DSM 5. Considering no new significant research findings were released in the past week on the DSM-5 revision efforts, I was a little surprised.

This latest fake news cycle started on Thursday, apparently with the release of a Reuters news story from Kate Kelland. Kelland notes the newest concern comes from “Liverpool University’s Institute of Psychology at a briefing in London about widespread concerns over the manual.” There’s no link to the briefing. And I’m not sure what a “briefing” is — a press conference? (And since when is a press conference a news item? It’s not really equivalent to a new research study, is it?)

Kelland fails to note that Europe and the U.K. don’t actually use the DSM to diagnose mental disorders — it’s a U.S. reference manual for mental disorders diagnosis. So while it’s nice that some Europeans are expressing concern about this reference text, their concern isn’t exactly much relevant. Context is everything, and Reuters failed to provide any useful context in that article.

Sadly, Reuters is a brand name. And once you write an article under that brand name, it cascades down an entire news cycle. Let’s follow it for fun!

Happy Saturday! Welcome to the weekend. Time to kick back, relax, and let the workweek stress just melt away. (Wouldn’t it be nice if we could melt stress away on command?)

If you had a busy week, you probably missed out a few of Psych Central’s most interesting news stories. But, do not fear: I’ve summarized three of our top brain, tech, and workplace news stories in this week’s “Week in Review” video podcast. In this episode, we answer the following questions:

• How do metaphors affect your brain?
• Can a Smartphone determine when you’re depressed?

• What causes a loss of $225.8 billion per year in the US alone?

Check out our latest video podcast below for the answers:

Recently, when I was rereading Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I was very struck by this observation about the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire:

The death of Guillaume Apollinaire at this time made a very serious difference to all his friends apart from their sorrow at his death. It was the moment just after the war when many things had changed and people naturally fell apart. Guillaume would have been a bond of union, he always had a quality of keeping people together, and now that he was gone everybody ceased to be friends.

The “quality of keeping people together” seems an important and rare attribute, and although it doesn’t come naturally to me, I’m trying to do a better job of it myself, and also to appreciate more the work of the Apollinaire-ish types whose efforts benefit me.

This quality has been on my mind since the sad occasion of a memorial service of a friend. I knew her in a work context, but at the service, I realized from the tributes of her college friends that, along with many other wonderful traits, she had the “quality of keeping people together” from that time.

My sister is this way, too, and from watching her in action, I know how much energy and time it takes to act like glue, to make the efforts that allow people to stay close.

There are a ton of good stories out there about people’s experiences with psychotherapy, and we want to feature them each week here on the World of Psychology. By shedding more light on the process of therapy, we believe it will make people more comfortable and perhaps get a better understanding of it.

So we’re putting out a call for any and all psychotherapy stories — from therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, clients and patients. If you have a story you want to tell and can do so in under 1,400 words, we’re interested.

We’re not looking (just) for salacious stories. We’re looking for stories that show the personal nature of therapy, and how it can help people.

Read on for details…

I recently ran across two different, new apps in development for smartphones and iPhones, both of which purport to measure a person’s mental health, happiness and even depression completely passively. (“Apps” are tiny pieces of software that run most commonly on portable devices.)

This, of course, is a Big Deal, since one of the major stumbling blocks of the thousands upon thousands of health apps are their need for something or someone to input personal health data. Without personal health data, health and mental health apps are generally pretty useless.

The method to measure one’s psychological well-being (or, as we more commonly refer to it, one’s happiness) passively is to use whatever metrics are available through the phone. Since phones generally only have a limited amount of inputs — voice, video, geo-positioning (GPS), and an accelerometer — your choices as a researcher interested in personal health data are pretty limiting.

Using only these four physical measurements, is it really possible to accurately and reliably measure a person’s well-being? Let’s find out.