Deciphering Your Love Language
When it comes to love, we are all a work in progress.
The good news is that we have everything we need to love well at our disposal. Love can become less convoluted by developing an understanding of and speaking love languages with fluency—and a little intentionality.
Remember the Five Love Languages? (Words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, gifts, and physical touch). As we look closer at these, let’s consider the role of communication and emotional awareness in couple interactions. Communication and emotional awareness are essential to developing an understanding of how love languages work.
Developing meaning through communication
As human beings, communication is central to making meaning of our experiences. This is especially true when it comes to relationships. What we tell ourselves about what we are experiencing in our interactions leads to thoughts and feelings that may either draw us toward or away from our partner.
If your primary love language is words of affirmation, when your partner says “I love you” this will most likely generate positive feelings. You may think to yourself: “I am truly loved and fortunate to have a partner that is so thoughtful.” This is bound to increase your feelings of affection toward your partner, perhaps inspiring a kiss or the reply, “I love you more.” This all draws you even closer to your partner. In contrast, negative communication like criticism, shortness, or mean-spirited sarcasm would most likely have the opposite effect.
Developing emotional awareness
Love in relationships is all about emotional connection. Our basic human need to feel loved is rooted in our emotions. So, the goal in speaking love languages must be to connect on an emotional level. Developing emotional awareness—both of yourself and your partner—is very important to this.
Even before we engage mentally or verbally, our emotions are already engaged. Positive emotions typically enhance connection, whereas negative emotions often lead to attempts to protect ourselves.
If we are not careful about how we interact with our partner, we could generate negative emotions. A pattern of negative interaction inevitably leads to emotional distance: the kryptonite to healthy couple relationships. In order to preserve our love, we must increase our emotional awareness, and be intentional about generating positive connections in our interactions.
Love is a choice
Love languages are the pathway to emotional connection. Love is a choice. How we give and receive love matters because of the meaning we make of our experience. Neglecting our partner’s primary love language leaves them feeling unloved. Even well-meaning attempts to love them in love languages that do not make them feel loved may be lost in translation.
There is no better way to make our partner feel loved and enhance our emotional connection than to learn and speak our partner’s love language fluently and regularly.
Three questions to consider
Here are three big questions when it comes to deciphering love languages.
1. What makes you feel loved? This is the first question to consider in order to discover one another’s primary love language.
2. What are your longings? What do you desire most or to have more of from your partner?
3. What makes you feel unloved? Love languages expressed as their opposites usually result in partners feeling unloved. For example, if you are not a particularly affectionate person and your partners primary love language is physical touch, your lack of affection would most likely lead lead to your partner feeling unattractive, undesirable and ultimately unloved. They may know with their mind that you love them, but feeling loved is an emotional response.
Remember, you are the expert on your love language because only you know the answer to these questions. Increasing your emotional awareness may be necessary if answering these questions is difficult. This simply means turning your awareness to what you are feeling during interactions. Once you’re more aware of these, you’re in a better spot to have positive emotional engagement with your partner.
Resources
There are lots of resources available to help you discover and enhance your love languages. Here are just a few:
Love Languages Quiz Link
Love language quizzes to find out what is your love language: 5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/love-language
Love Language Action Plan from betterlove.com
By Dr. Les and Leslie Parrott. This resource offers couples and individuals:
Unlock combined love languages
Personalized insights on 10 areas of your relationship
Deeper insight into love languages
Highly personalized roadmap
Action plan for growth
The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman
Gary Chapman literally wrote the book on the Five Love Languages. This book is an easy read and an essential tool for anyone seeking to gain a better understanding of this topic.
God is Love
Our foremost valuable love language resource is God. God is Love! Love was the motivating force that inspired God to send His Son, Jesus to die on the cross for the sins of the world. What better example is there of the sacrificial nature of love in its purest form than in the Person of Jesus Christ? “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (John 15:13). As image-bearers of God, when we understand that love is not something to be possessed but rather given, then we are better able to make good use of having this power at our disposal. We love because He first loved us (John 4:19).