Love isn’t always straight forward. Even when you seem to have found the perfect person for you, miscommunication and conflicting ways of expressing love can challenge any relationship.
Have you ever questioned whether your partner really loves you? Perhaps it annoys you that all they want is to be intimate yet never really tell you how they feel with words? Perhaps you go out of your way to find gifts to show you think about them but they seem unimpressed when they receive them? You may interpret them as being ungrateful but it could just be that they don’t value this as a particular sign of love.
When it feels so right to be with someone but the flow of giving and receiving love seems difficult it could just be down to the mismatch of our love language.
What is Love Language?
Love languages are how we express and consider love in different ways. According to Gary Chapman, the author of the book “The 5 Love Languages”, there are 5 different love languages:
- Words of Affirmation: This is when a person uses words more than anything else. They express love by articulating their feelings more than physical action like spending time with someone or giving gifts.
- Acts of Service: These are the people who believe actions speak louder than words. Showing someone love through an act is far more powerful than saying it to their face. This could come out in daily actions such as cooking their favourite dinner or running errands for them in order to show love.
- Receiving Gifts: Many think receiving gifts is a big sign of love. They feel it shows they’re thinking of someone, that they’ve gone out of their way to make them happy and brightened their day.
- Quality Time: Time is something we can’t get back so giving up your time to spend it with the one you love is one way of showing how much you love someone. For many it shows you’re making the other person a priority over anything else going on in your life at that moment.
- Physical Touch: Physical love is important in a relationship whether it’s sex, cuddling or holding hands. Many people see this as a strong way of expressing their love over words or any other actions.
You may agree with some of these ideas of showing love or strongly disagree and this is where the problem could lie. None of these are right or wrong but if you show love through telling someone on a regular basis, but your partner shows it more through physical touch, there’s a danger of interpreting these two languages as very different.
Take the Love Language Test to Find Out How You Communicate Love
Everyone can express love in a different way from their partner. We tend to express love to others how we want love to be expressed to us. If we then receive love in a different way, we can start to assume that they are not loving us to the same degree as we love them. This is when relationships can start breaking down.Instead we should take the time to understand each others’ love languages to be able to interpret the way we love and the different ways we are actually loved by others.
Taking the love language assessment will give you insight into both you and your partner’s idea of expressing love. We’re all using different languages and the key is to interpret them correctly and translate them accordingly with no judgement.
The result will allow you both to understand each other and connect more fully in your relationship. But this doesn’t just apply to romantic love – our primary love language is most likely used in how we connect to friends and family.
So make sure you take the love language assessment to find out which language you tend to use and value the most. Swap results with your loved ones and use it as a way to find out and understand how each of you show your love for each other.
Featured photo credit: Stocksnap via stocksnap.io
