Epiphany

I fell right over into an epiphany this week.  An epiphany about something I thought I understood.  Thought I had understood it for a very long time.  I was partially correct.  Sadly, I may have not understood the most important aspect.  So I’m very grateful for this epiphany.

Gary Chapman wrote a book almost twenty years ago titled “The Five Love Languages“.  He posits there are five primary ways to express love and everyone has a love language or a way that they receive love best.  The five languages are:  words of affirmation, physical touch, receiving gifts, acts of service, and quality time.

My husband and I have both gone through the various love language assessments and have a pretty good idea of what our individual love languages are (we both actually have more than one that are very strong for us).  It’s also really helpful that our love languages have areas of similarity because one issue for most couples is that they tend to speak love in their own love language rather than speaking love in their spouse’s love language.

So back to the epiphany.  We’re at a good milestone in our marriage for a marriage health check-up and besides this has been a pretty hard year.  We have some “little foxes” that needed to be addressed.  So we made an appointment with a counselor that was recommended by one of Dan’s friends and went off to spend an hour with him.

He asked us at one point in time if we knew what our love languages were.  He then talked about the power using someone’s love language has in a relationship – power to really build and/or restore a relationship.  To put cash in the relationship bank.  That’s the part that I’ve always understood.

The epiphany for me came when I realized that not speaking someone’s love language isn’t neutral.  It is destructive.  It feels coldly deliberate.  The analogy to being at a party where everyone speaks Russian and you don’t, is apt.  You feel left outside, ignored, unwanted, a pariah.  Everyone else keeps speaking louder and louder believing that you just need to hear the same thing in order to get what you are being told.  Well that doesn’t work there.  Why would it work with love languages?  How much more uncomfortable and painful.  And destructive.

I think I’ll go hug my husband.