Relationship Advice: Using Love Languages
By: Jeff Herring
What is a person’s love language?
Each person’s love language is simply the way in which love is best communicated to him or her.
For many people, they need to see it. They need to be shown by what a person does.
For some people, simply saying “I love you” does the trick. They need to hear it.
For others, touch or physical affection is needed to convey love. They need, quite literally, to feel it.
The difficulty lies in the fact that it is human nature to convey to someone else in our own love language.
Do you and your partner need a translation?
This is great, as long as our partner has the same love language as we do. If it’s different, however, we may find ourselves telling a person who needs to feel it that we love them, and then wondering why they are not quite convinced.
Think of it for yourself - do you mostly need to hear it, see it or feel it?
One way to discover your partner’s love language is to simply to ask this question:
“In order for you to feel totally loved by me, do you have to hear it, see it or feel it?”
Once you get the answer, you have learned your partner’s love language.
Let’s create a fictional couple, Bob and Mary, to see how powerful using your partner’s love language can be.
I recently met with Bob and Mary and sent them home with the assignment of practicing “love languages” with each other.
They did a good job with this assignment.
One of the sticking places had to do with Bob misunderstanding one of the ways Mary would love for him to meet one of her emotional needs. She had spent the better part of the week trying to say the same thing to him, over and over, with him not being able to understand.
Knowing that Bob’s love language is through touch (feeling), I asked Mary to say the same words to him, only this time simply to put her hand on his arm while she said it.
Mary tried this, and the difference was striking:
Bob sat up straight and said,
“Oh, that’s what you have been saying. Now I get it. I can do that!”
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