Will your relationship go the distance? Interestingly, the speech patterns that you and your partner share could give you a clue into the future of your love. Researchers at Texas Tech University say that when couples use "function words" in the same manner, they`re more likely to make it long-term. Um, function words? They`re personal pronouns such as "he, she, it," or articles such as "a, an, or the," and conjunctions including "or, but, and nor."

Interestingly, in analyzing the data, researchers found that language similarity ended up being a bigger predictor of relationship success than just how similar two people are, how much they talk to each other, or even how happy they felt about the relationship.

"We were surprised by how well language similarity predicted relationship stability above and beyond these other variables," said one of the study`s lead researchers in a statement. "People also aren`t very good at predicting ahead of time what they`ll find attractive on a date. So in a way, language predicts what people want in a partner better than they do themselves."

This isn`t the first round of data linking speech similarity to long-term relationship satisfaction. Another recent University of Texas-Austin study found that happy couples tend to mimic each other`s speaking styles.

BDST: 1659HRS, MAR-02, 2014