The five basic love languages are Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, and Receiving Gifts, along with Acts of Service and Physical Touch. Introduced by Dr. Gary Chapman in 1992, this concept explains how people express and feel emotional love in relationships. I think people tend to give and receive through different love languages, let’s unpack this below-
Expressing Love (My Love Language):
I know my preferred way to express emotional love is by giving gifts. I have a whole section of my closet dedicated to my gift giving habit and I add little things, as I come across them, to the closet stash all year long. Actually there are not that many people that I still traditionally exchange gifts with any more, but I like to be ready for her teacher’s gifts or especially family and not rushing around every holiday, since giving a thoughtful gift, that the other person enjoys is very important to me.
My ex-husband’s preferred love language that was hard for me to give was quality time. I felt like I already gave so much time to our relationship and doing activities that he wanted to do that I didn’t have much more additional one on one time to give him, especially when I am working full time. This was an unreal expectation of my ex-husband for our past relationship, but I wish we had talked about it more at the time.
Receiving Love (My Love Language):
The way I like to receive love is through acts of service or words of affirmation. Now this partially was a good fit with my ex-husband because he was a do-er and liked to do things to show he cared, so that satisfied the “acts of service” part of my love language. However, he was not very good with compliments and in fact did the opposite and put me down a lot either directly or indirectly. It was hard to take all of the time and definitely had a negative affect on my confidence and self-esteem. This really depleted my love language of “words of affirmation”, and made it hard for me to fill that cup.
In Conclusion:
I think with our love languages to give and receive love possibly being different, we need to keep in mind that giving love in the way the other person prefers through their love language preferences is most important to keep in mind and try to follow through with, instead of being focused just on our own love languages. Communication is also key when it comes to giving and receiving the appropriate love language that each person prefers.
Communicating more in my marriage before everything got so much worse is one regret I have, because by the time we took the step to go to marriage counseling it was too late and our fighting had gotten so intense that no amount of “working on it” with a therapist was going to help the situation at that point unfortunately. Marriage counseling just helped me see more clearly that leaving was my only option at that point in our relationship.
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