If this is your spouse’s primary love language, establish a daily sharing time to talk about the things that happened to them that day. Be willing to do activities, just the two of you that give you time to get away and really share thoughts and feelings with one another.
By Joanne PutnamÂ
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Keeping love “alive” in a marriage is serious business. It requires time, effort, commitment and a desire to meet the other person’s needs.
One of the number one reasons cited for divorce today is lack of communication. How can that be you say? We both speak the same language. We should be able to understand each other! You may speak only one verbal language, but you “communicate” in many different ways. You communicate in the tone of your voice, in your body language and the way in which you demonstrate love to one another.
What would your home be like if one morning you woke up to find that everyone spoke a different language? You spoke French, your husband spoke Mandarin Chinese, your son spoke Swahili and your daughter spoke Russian. I dare say it would be quite difficult to “communicate” with one another!
If you really loved one another, you would do your best to work together on figuring out what the other person was saying. You would have patience and realize that in time you would learn to communicate. Either you would learn their language or they would learn your language.
Dr. Gary Chapman, in his book The Five Love Languages, teaches that each of us speaks different emotional love languages. You may speak the same verbal language but the way you demonstrate and understand “love” is often “spoken” in different ways. Just as you have a primary spoken language, you have a primary love language. Your primary love language is what comes natural to you. It is what you do automatically. The conflicts come when your spouse does not speak the same love language that you do.
You think you are showing them love by the things you do or say, but you see no response or appreciation from them and you don’t understand. You work hard all week cooking and
cleaning, taking care of the children and fixing delicious meals, but your spouse rarely acts like he notices! You interpret that to mean that he doesn’t really love you or appreciate you. On the other hand, he feels the same way. He plans little surprises or get-a-ways to spend quality time with you and you respond as though it was a waste of your time. He interprets your actions to say you don’t want to spend time with him. You are each expressing love to the other, but it is like you are speaking to one another in a foreign language. Neither understands the other. It is not something that is done intentionally. It is an aspect of miscommunication.
Most people never understand what the real problem is. They go through the relationship feeling frustrated because they don’t feel their needs are being met. They don’t realize their spouse is feeling the same way. As a result, they “fall out of love.” They begin to withdraw from one another. They begin to emotionally separate from their spouse and if they are not careful, they will begin to look for someone else to meet their emotional needs.
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