Learning your spouse's love language

 
 

 I recently enjoyed reading the book "The Five Love Languages" by Gary Chapman for the first time. I had heard about it for years but never had I actually read it. I think there was a reason I had heard about it many times - he has a lot of neat insight in this book and I think most people would find it helpful.

 The premise of the book is that there are various "love languages" (He says 5) and generally everybody will have one that they speak best and it is "their love language". How this can affect us is when a couple gets together and they have different love languages so even though they are trying to loving each other say the husband gives lots of gifts to his wife (as that is the "language that he best understands) and the wife does all sorts of acts service to her husband but neither one of them feel loved because their spouse isn't "talking" in a language that they understand. That example may be a little extreme but I think the book has a valid point.

 The 5 love languages that he has identified are: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service and Physical Touch.  He does also point out that each of those can have various "dialects" in them. For instance in Quality Time might be the language of both but one might see that as weekly date nights away from the kids while the other might like camping trips as a family.

 The way that I have found this book helpful is just causing me to think about the ways that both Ken and I express love and being able to notice various times he is expressing love (even though it might not be in my "language") and then also trying to make my expressions of love fit his language. It has also been fun to think about this in terms of my children and others that I know and notice what works for them and try to love them in that way.

  This book was also fun to prompt discussions between Ken and I.

I enjoyed it and I would recommend it to others.