What's your Love Language?

I just finished reading The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. After a thorough reflection, I found out that my love language is “Words of Affirmation” while D is “Quality Time”.

It never occurred to us that we understand love differently. Now I understand why D would wake up at 4:00AM in the morning just to see me run in a race. He was mirroring his love language to me! And I’ve been so hard on him these past few days because lately everything I do during his day off. He’s always right there beside me!

Now that I know his love language. I can give more of my love and myself to him.

Here’s what The Five Love Languages is all about:

Communicating love isn’t as easy as feeling “in love,” because it’s quite a different thing. Falling in love is not an act of the will or a conscious choice. It’s effortless. One who is “in love” is not genuinely interested in fostering the personal growth of the other person. If the euphoric pleasure of being “in love” never ended, we might never experience true love and meaningful communication.

Love is something you do for someone else, not something you do for yourself. Most of us do many things each day that do not come “naturally” for us. For some of us, that is getting out of bed in the morning. We go against our feelings and get out of bed because we believe there is something worthwhile to do that day. And normally, before the day is over, we feel good about having gotten up. Our actions preceded our emotions.

The same is true with love. We discover the primary love language of our spouse, and we choose to speak it whether or not it is natural for us. You might not love the language itself, but speaking it will clearly communicate love to your spouse.

Love is a choice. And either partner can start the process today.