Before I discovered the concept of the 5 love languages, a bit of advice I was given was to become a student of my wife and to take time to learn what makes her feel loved. I soon learned that what makes her feel loved may not always be the thing I want to do because it may not come natural to me. But learning to love her in the way that makes her feel loved is a greater demonstration of my love for her, because I've chosen to do it with a goal of pleasing her.
Interpretation
Understanding and adapting to your partner's love language enhances your relationship.
This quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing and learning to express love in ways that resonate with your partner. It highlights that true love involves selflessness, effort, and a willingness to understand and meet your partner's emotional needs, even if it requires stepping out of your comfort zone.
In practice
During a couple's workshop on relationships.
Good marriages are built upon a combination of emotional love and a common commitment to a core of beliefs about what is important in life and what we wish to do with our lives. Speaking each other's primary love language creates the emotional climate where these beliefs can be fleshed out in daily life.
If you want to improve a relationship, it's not that you demand your spouse to change. You have to ask, 'Where did I fail in this relationship?'
People tend to criticize their spouse most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need.
Typically, we get annoyed when our spouses complain. We get defensive. But, really, when your spouse complains, he or she is giving you wonderful information about what would make him or her feel loved.
People do not get married planning to divorce. Divorce is the result of a lack of preparation for marriage and the failure to learn the skills of working together as teammates in an intimate relationship.
Thou shalt not commit adultry is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it: children at birth. Children in the cradle. School children. Youths and maidens. Fresh adults. Older ones. Men and women of 40. Of 50. Of 60. Of 70. Of 80. Of 100. The command does not distribute its burden equally, and cannot. It is not hard upon the three sets of children.
To admonish your brother in private is to advise him and improve him. But to admonish him publicly is to disgrace and shame him.
We have to believe that we can hold different points of view without labeling each other bad feminists.
And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.
And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unbreakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?
In fact, every woman I met seemed disposable and replaceable. I was experiencing seducer's paradox: The better a seducer I became, the less I loved women. Success was no longer defined by getting laid or finding a girlfriend, but by how well I performed.
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