The Changing Face of Love Languages

It is possible for someone to have been married a long time and miss the subtle fact that Love Languages, the ways in which we communicate our love and understand the love of each other, change with time and situations.  What at one time was a wonderful way to express our love to a spouse at some point may have become worn out through abuse or failure to follow through. 

An example may help my point here.  We may start out our marriage being able to use flowers as an expression of our thoughtfulness and love to our spouse.  Later, it becomes possible and even more welcome sometimes to perform more direct acts of thoughtfulness such as filling up her gas tank when she thinks she will have to do it, or doing the dishes, or folding the laundry she fell asleep on because she was exhausted.

These acts also say in much the same way as flowers do, but sometimes more potently, that I love you and am devoted to your happiness. 

Sometimes, we use the token expressions, such as candy or flowers but in other ways fail to show or to follow through with expression of our love, to the extent that the tokens lose their meaning and effectiveness.  Sometimes situations change, money gets tight, she feels more burden than before, he feels more detached, and so the things that we need to feel loved and to feel love for our spouse might take on a different flavor.

In a loving relationship, it may be easy enough to find out what the new love language is that we must learn to express our love in a better more fulfilling way, but like any language, it may be a stretch to learn and may cause us to feel that too much is being expected of us. Sometimes we show our love language to our spouse through our own actions hoping they will mirror those actions without realizing that their language is different and thus we may only be showing them how we want to be communicated to but not doing a very good job of communicating in our partner's love language ourselves.

Sometimes the best thing we can do to feel more loved, is to love more, without any thought of how long it may take for that love to be returned. Obviously forever is too long to wait, I speak only of a relationship where one or the other has for a time, withdrawn their willingness to express what they feel because they are hurting and need to feel safe again. So our best action is to help them feel safe again.

It is not always easy to get to this point, but it can begin a whole new level of wonder if we can push beyond the obstacles that threaten us and open up into a new world of discovery. Sometimes, this can only be done with outside help. If needed, get some.

There is no way to know easily that one has reached such an impasse without decent communications. Some people never get there, some couples never get there, and so they fade away. Don't be that person. There's too much at stake.