What is Your Love Language?
On special days, like birthdays, anniversaries, and Valentine’s Day, people enjoy spending time with the ones they love and treat each other a little gentler, with more patience and a sense of wonder at being together. Wouldn’t it be amazing to bottle this loving feeling and access it every day when our patience and irritation with our loved ones wears thin?
The Five Love Languages
Building a more carefree and loving relationship with a foundation of calmness, patience, and respect revolves around understanding that person’s love language. In his #1 New York Times bestseller, The 5 Love Languages, Dr. Gary Chapman reveals that we all have different ways that we give and receive love, and how we communicate. We can’t change our loved ones’ personalities, nor make them into something they are not. Instead, we need to love them the way they need to be loved.
The five love languages according to Chapman are: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch. Each of us has one or two of these languages that we prefer, while the others may not mean as much to us. Where we run into problems is when the love we are trying to show our partners or our children doesn’t have the same impact on them. To one of your children, quality time might mean everything, but they don’t care as much about being praised. Another child might thrive on words of affirmation, but all the acts of service that you do for them may not make them feel loved in the same way.
Love Languages in Action
We need to spend some time gauging our loved ones’ reactions to how we interact with them and treat them, to see how we can better show up for them. Understanding that it’s okay not to need and want the same things is important so that you can both be happy, without ending up resenting the other person. My husband and I both value Acts of Service as our primary love language, while receiving gifts is not important to either of us. While quality time is somewhat important, we seem content to co-exist with smaller spurts of time spent together, as we value pursuing our own interests. We show our love primarily through acts of service, and we don’t feel the need to constantly affirm our feelings verbally. In many ways, we are fortunate that we are on the same page in how we give and receive love.
Children Have Unique Needs
When it comes to my daughters, as with most children, they couldn’t be more different. My older daughter often expresses that she wants more words of affirmation and quality time. Because my husband and I don’t gravitate towards these modes as naturally, I have to make a conscious effort to be more expressive with her and to have many in-depth conversations to make her feel connected. My younger daughter is more of an independent spirit like us and seems to value a mix of acts of service that we do for her, along with some quality time.
You can think of it this way; some people are more high maintenance, in need of more connection, while others are more independent. We have developed these personalities over a long period of time, and before we arrived in these relationships, so it’s important to realize that we can’t just change who we are overnight, but that we often will need to adapt a little, in order to make the ones we have chosen to love, feel valued and fulfilled.
