Male Quirks and Female Foibles

Speaking Your Spouse's Love Language

One Monday night as Valentine's Day approached, I watched "Seventh Heaven" and "Everwood." (The shows certainly date when I wrote this.) Both shows depicted Valentine's Day as the day women expect their men to make a grand romantic gesture to prove their love.

Doc Harold on Everwood told his step-father-in-law that it is a "lose-lose" proposition. If the gesture is grand enough, the man is doomed to have every Valentine's Day thereafter compared to it and so has to go to greater and greater lengths to prove his love. If it isn't grand enough, the woman feels unloved.

I wonder what retailer with deep pockets paid television scriptwriters to portray Valentine's Day as the end all and be all in the arena of love declaration. Because, after all, the ways men are enticed to say I love you require the expenditure of money on cards, candy, and ever more expensive presents, with a diamond, according to jewelers' advertisements, being the best way to say, "I love you."

I imagine each woman has her own personal idea of how her man can say I love you, and I doubt that diamonds figure into most of their scenarios. I have an excellent book entitled "The Five Love Languages" by Gary Chapman. Its premise is that people hear love in a language of preference.

The author lists "touch, quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, and service" as the five languages. He says that each person prefers to have love spoken in one of those languages. That love language combines with the person's personality, wants and desires to give them a unique language of love.

If service is a person's love language, service that the individual desires says "I love you" the loudest. If words of affirmation are her language, just any card won't do. It has to have a very personal message. That means either hours reading cards to find just the right one, or better yet, writing one of your own.

You probably get the picture. The "one size fits all" gimmicks the advertisers promote are not the best way to express love. Expressions of love need to be individualized.

The idea of expressing love once a year with one grand gesture that will tide the woman over for a year is also an empty promise. Human beings are born with a deep-seated need to be loved.

Chapman says that each of us has a love tank that needs to be filled, preferably daily. He notes that every negative act is like punching a hole in the love tank, allowing what's inside to slowly leak out. He believes it takes approximately five acts of love to make up for one negative act.

Unfortunately, we sometimes have a problem speaking our spouse's love language. When your love languages are different, you may have to make a concerted effort to learn to speak the other person's love language.

My husband Wayne's highest love language is words of affirmation, one of the lower love languages on my personal love language continuum. He needs to know that I appreciate him and respect him. That means when he preaches, I need to comment on his sermon.

I need to give him positive feedback in the areas that are important to him. I have to make a concerted effort to do this because telling him these things over and over seems redundant to me.

A card on Valentine's Day does not meet this need. I have to hug him verbally much more often than once a year. I have yet to find a card that says what he needs to hear. Instead, I have to tell him in my own words.

I know some of you are sitting there, shaking your heads and thinking, "If that is true, then all those columns poking fun at him must have punctured his love tank so that it is beyond repair."

Fortunately, that is not true because when I write funny columns about him, they are about his actions in areas that don't define who he is. Most of them are columns that he suggests because he thinks people would get a laugh out of them. He doesn't mind if people laugh with him.

Wayne's second love language is touch, the language that doesn't even register on my survey. Until I read Chapman's book, I thought all of Wayne's touchy-feely ways indicated lust, not love. I sort of hoped his touch needs would dull with familiarity. They haven't, and I have learned how to offer as well as receive touch.

Lately I have been trying to convince Wayne to give me periodic shoulder massages. They should satisfy his love language, touch, and mine, service. Unfortunately getting to massage me does not seem to satisfy his touch needs the way a hug does.

Wayne was glad that I read Chapman's book because I have been filling his love tank better since I did. He said the only problem is that I made him read it and then informed him my love language is service.

"To fill my love tank all you have to do is say something nice and give me a pat on the back," he noted. "To fill your love tank I have to vacuum the living room."

My second love language is quality time so after he vacuum's the living room, he needs to sit down and talk with me about something that is important to me. We can go for a walk, too; but what he prefers is to watch television with me, something that never registers on my quality time scale.

So, guys, spending money is not the way to a woman'sheart; unless gifts are her love language, of course.