The desire for romantic love in marriage is deeply rooted in our psychological makeup. If you have noticed, most of the popular magazines, has at least an article relating to keeping the sparkles alive in a marriage. We also get tips from radios and television talk shows. But with all the magazines, books, talk shows available, you still find out that only few couples seems to have pointed out the secrets to keep love alive after marriage.
Base on research, I can't say all those books and talk shows on love aren't helpful, the major issue here is that we've all failed to acknowledge one fundamental truth. Human beings speak different love languages.
Let's use Linguistics as an example. In linguistics, there are major languages like English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German etc. Every human being grow up learning the language of their parents, which becomes the primary language or native tongue. Later, we may decide to learn other languages but usually with extra effort. That becomes our secondary language. We become more fluent with the secondary language when we use it all the time. But we still feel more comfortable speaking our native language compared to the secondary language. If for instance we speak only our primary language and we encounter someone else that also speak only there primary language, a communication gap occurs. ie, they will find it hard communicating with each other.
The same principle applies to love languages. Your emotional love languages and the language of your spouse may be as different as German and French. No matter how hard you try to love your wife in German, if she understands only French, you won't understand each other.
According to Gary Chapman, there are 5 basic love languages.
- Word of affirmation
- Physical touch
- Gifts
- Quality time
- Act of service.
For instance, he buys you a car (gift) but what you really want is time to talk and be with you (quality time ) Or she gives you a hug (physical touch) but what you really want is a home cooked meal (act of service ).
The problem isn't your love, it's your love languages. We tend to speak our primary love language but we become worried when our spouse is not communicating, which to them is viewed as a foreign language. Once we discover and understand our primary love language as well as our spouse primary love language, I believe we'll discover the key to a happy marriage. Love doesn't need to relinquish after the wedding but to keep the spark alive, we've to put more effort to learn a secondary language and not rely only on our native language which our spouse find very hard to understand. If we want them to feel the love we have for them, we should express it in their love language.
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