Our love language is how we express and experience love. There are 5 love languages (check out the book by Gary Chapman). Everyone receives and expresses love differently. How we choose and are made to communicate with others makes us unique. Everyone doesn’t show affection the same and it is important to understand others, as well as ourselves. Having a better understanding will make it easier to communicate with others. Knowing how those close to you experience love can also help build and nurture a relationship.
In my relationship with my wife, I tend to be the less exciting member (from my perspective). I think that my wife gives an outward appearance of having more energy and excitement than I do. I have found this to cause a learning opportunity for myself. She enjoys celebrating and dancing, while I tend to just relax and perform tasks quietly. As I said above, I am pretty sure that I am the boring one.
The Evaluation
From the mind of Gary Chapman, we have 5 love languages. All of them fit somewhere in our lives and some of them are more important to us than others. On his site, there is a quiz to help you understand the values that we have on our love languages and how we display them.
- Words of Affirmation
- Quality Time
- Acts of Service
- Gifts
- Touch
If you have not seen this before, I urge you to look into his book and read up on them. Learning more about yourself gives you a better understanding in relationship communication. I have found that learning more about myself helps me to apply myself more productively in my relationships. It’s not an easy task, but you will learn more as you take the quiz and look into yourself.
I am the type of person that feels appreciation through Gifts. If I do work for somebody or have an accomplishment, I tend to feel more appreciation from others with a gift than any of the other categories. This doesn’t mean that I feel nothing from the others, but they tend not to be as impactful.
My wife is the type of person that feels the most appreciation and love through Words of Affirmation. She enjoys Acts of Service quite a bit, but giving her encouraging words or telling her than I am proud of her is more impactful. Cleaning our house or doing laundry tends to be my choice for performing Acts of Service. Something important to consider when looking at your Love Language is we tend to convey outward what we want to receive. As an example, I tend to feel like I am showing the most appreciation and love toward others when I give gifts. My wife tends to give me Words of Affirmation when she thinks I am doing a good job.
The Challenge
Since my wife’s primary love language is Words and Affirmation, it can be hard for me to convey to her what she needs in our relationship. Words of Affirmation is at the bottom of my list, so I have to work at it in our relationship. It’s not easy to convey love in a way that our mind thinks is not as important or impactful to ourselves. I have found this to be the hardest part of communicating love and appreciation to my wife.
I urge you to follow the link above and take the quiz. If nothing else, it will spark a good conversation between you and your significant other. Maybe you will learn something that will help you to communicate and build a better relationship.