Why Your Love Language Doesn’t Matter

Posted on by

Have you ever found something so revolutionary that it changed the way you did things? In my life I have found a number of things that made my head spin, my world clearer, or my world bigger. In the late 90’s one such idea came from a book that really got me churning that was called “The Five Love Languages.” It seemed to make relationships between a husband and wife simpler and easier to grasp than the odd complexity I had developed prior to reading it.  It made me want to explore love with my bride-to-be.  The problem with such concepts as the five love languages is that people hear them, learn them, or come into contact with them and them get set off in the wrong direction because they don’t understand them as merely principles.

If you’re not familiar with the five love languages let me give you this simple list of the five:

  1. Words of Affirmation
  2. Quality Time
  3. Receiving Gifts
  4. Acts of Service
  5. Physical Touch

The gist of the book is that each person has a primary way that they perceive  and express love with their spouse.  Furthermore each spouse is strongly encouraged to explore their partner’s love language and keep that in mind when expressing love for him or her.  I spent quite a bit of time liking the idea of focusing on exploring my bride’s love language and even figured out that this could be used, in a modified way, with my friends to express care for them.  Ta-da!  So did the book’s authors and other books in the series of love languages and their application were born and money was had through conferences, tests, merchandising and copyright infringement lawsuits from unlicensed tattoos [I made that last one up].  This is psychology stuff, so I’m sure that someone also discovered a sixth, seventh and eighth love language and has been trying to write papers proving the adequacy of those numbers of love languages for thesis papers and making a good practice out of helping marriages and relationships discover their tertiary love language.

Here’s the rub: this is overly complex despite the simplicity and it gets used as a poor excuse for husbands and wives to not love one another.  At least not to their fullest.  I want to explain that moving forward from here I’m going to be focused on a few Bible verses that I think make the five love languages childs play, and probably unnecessary.  The first place we should take a look is Ephesians 5:22-27:

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.

What I see as I meditate on the above passage is something beyond the five love languages and something that should drive a wife absolutely coo-coo-bananas in love with her husband.  A self-sacrificing husband.  A guy who takes the five love languages in, sees their inadequacy, and says, “I’m going to love you in a million ways, and these five are merely a tiny, tiny tip of the iceberg.”  I recently saw on Twitter a guy who said that he was sorry to his wife (publicly on Twitter?) that his primary love language was acts of service.  Lameness.  If her love language is knitting pot holders it doesn’t matter.  If his language was bringing stray cats home to be fed, bathed, and neutered it doesn’t matter.  Sacrificial love trumps all of the given concepts of love languages because it looks for opportunities to love in every aspect, every place, and it is not strapped to a single, primary concept of perceived or expressed love.

As a secondary point against not stopping with this love language concept is that one of the joys of my marriage with my wife has been exploring each of the facets of expression of love and trying to see how they can be expressed in deeper, more meaningful ways.  Just as humans mature (or at least should mature) we look for ways to express love in a sacrificial, yet exploratory way.  To make a food analogy just because I like vanilla ice cream doesn’t mean I don’t explore toppings, other flavors and other combinations within the world of ice cream (or frozen desserts).  The same analogy applied to music means I don’t stop at the Beatles just because I like rock and roll quartets.  Bring on trios [Cream], duos [Simon & Garfunkel], classical, dance, beat boxing, and opera*.

I’ve discovered that my wife pretty much likes all five love languages [in different quantities at different times] because she knows that they’re expressing love to her.  I would probably not be wrong in saying that 99.999% of guys love physical touch [which often gets interpreted as physical intimacy, and for the sake of argument I’m going there now], but if let us face the facts: not all gals are wired for 24/7 physical touching and there may come a time when they’re bleeding, PMS-ing, medically unavailable, or holding a kitchen knife.  It might be a good time, Mr. physical touch, to explore the finer nuances of quality time, words of affirmation, gifts [read: chocolate], or acupressure to relieve headaches.  Sacrificially speaking get a grip, turn off your hormones for a moment and love your wife some other way so she doesn’t feel the need to lock herself in the bathroom, wear chain armor, or buy a slice-wire-bikini from Victoria’s Secret Weapon.

I want to close by saying I don’t hate the general principles behind the five love languages.  They were a good starting point for me and helped me grasp why I might be miss-communicating with my bride-to-be.  They’re not an excuse to be short sighted, justify weaknesses, or get in a rut.  Make it a point to look for ways to create a richer, more complex relationship with your spouse by abandoning your love language and loving with your exploratory, revolutionary hats on.

*Stay away from country music which is an infectious disease [Just kidding (Not really)]

10 Useless Things in Order of Importance

Posted on by
  1. Calamari
  2. The Clapper
  3. Paper Chinese Take-out boxes
  4. The phrase “angels on the head of a needle”
  5. The Book of Norman
  6. Sensationalistic Media
  7. The Home Shopping Network
  8. Bright Spandex workout clothes from the 80’s
  9. Urinary Tract infections
  10. Robert Tilton

Top Five Movies I Saw At the Theater in 2009

Posted on by
  1. Up – tear jerker, but brilliant
  2. Star Trek – great plot, great acting, great special effects, great Leonard Nemoy work.
  3. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatloaf – silly, but fun kids movie
  4. The Informat – This one is last place.  Don’t see it unless a moustached, fat, Matt Damon is your thing.  It is not my thing.

I haven’t seen five movies in the theater in one year in over a decade [newly wed in TX].

I just Killed a Bug

Posted on by

I spent much of the afternoon looking for a bug.  A bug I just sat down and killed after getting frustrated with Super Mario Brothers Wii.  I was so frustrated with the video game I needed to unwind.  I do this, apparently, by killing koopas that are in my kode.  Go figure.

The good news is that the bug is one of the last few bugs I have in this control and I’ll be able to move onto other bug killing tasks.  Dead bugs are good, ones that I don’t know about are the worst, and ones I know about drive me bonkers.  The good news is that as an exterminator I can take off that hat and become a creator.  I can create good, clean, new code that will be tested and reliable (hopefully).  This is the side of my job I like the most: creator.  When I create a bug, its on accident, when I create a feature, its exciting and I can’t wait to get back user feedback, change requests and generally improve the software.  I also like to make it faster and smaller.  This version is at least 10% smaller than past versions, and the good news is that its also faster because of it.

Good night, I’ve killed a bug, I’ve relaxed, and I’ve written a blog post.  That’s more than I can say about some nights.  Bowser, I’ll be back for you tomorrow.

Sledding

Posted on by

I did some AWESOME sledding this last weekend.  The awesomeness was in the fact that I forgot I wasn’t 17 and crashed into the snow.  Do you know what is under snow?  Solid ground that the snow has landed and accumulated on.  My shoulder still aches a bit from the crash, but the good news is that while I’m 15 years past 17, my kids still think I’m awesome for doing stupid stunts 🙂  Maturity indeed.

Lessons from This Last Week

Posted on by

This last few months has been topically about maturity for me.  It is not that I felt immature, but that I was thinking immaturely in some areas of my life.  A few weeks ago I posted the following quote on Twitter:

“We are not mature until we accept full responsibility for our choices.” – Chester McCalley

This quote has been running through my mind since hearing it.  I wrestle with responsibility because part of me is immature, I am still 14 in some parts of me (and not just the parts of me that like fart jokes).  I have been identifying some of those places with the help of the Holy Spirit and looking for opportunities to look at them from a heavenly perspective.  Not a perspective of “What can I fix to make me all better by myself?”  But more of the angle of, “What can I look at from a heavenly perspective?”  I’ve been trying to look at the consequences of my choices with the right attitude: I made the choice, I face the consequence.  But one of the things that came to bear on my mind was this last Tuesday when I got a speeding ticket.

I was driving Abby to the dentist and I was not paying attention to my speed.  I was not intentionally speeding, but I was also not intentionally driving the speed limit.  I looked over, saw the officer, glanced down, and saw I was going WAY too fast.  He turned on his lights, and I pulled over.  I knew I was speeding, I knew I was violating the law, and I knew it was my fault.  I knew I was responsible.  While I’m not proud of my having sped, I took the opportunity to love my little passenger (who was rather concerned for my interaction with the officer because she didn’t want me to go to jail) and explain to her that all the times I tell her, “think before you act,” were equally applicable to me.  I had not been thinking before I acted with my speed.  A lesson learned.

On top of this hefty lesson from my own life there, I was able to encourage the police office.  That’s right, I was encouraging the police officer who had given me a ticket.  I had said, “Merry Christmas,” to him.  He replied, “Merry Christmas.  I feel kinda dirty saying that after giving you this [ticket].”  I told him that he needn’t worry about giving me a ticket because he was just doing his job.  A job that needs doing.  I think he was shocked I wasn’t mad at him.  I think he was surprised that I was so positive about him doing his job.  This was an area where I could see maturity as a critical part of me looking at my mistake.  I’ve been awfully careful about my speed the rest of the week, and on top of that, I was thinking a lot more about how I should be representing adulthood to my family.

[NOT TO BE ANSWERED IN THE COMMENTS :)]

What is the biggest struggle you face when thinking of maturity?  Where do you need to have a mature perspective?  I don’t think that I am operating with blind spots until they’re shown me.  Do you mind having them shown?  How best do we talk to others about these areas in life (if it is even appropriate to do so)?

Four Year Old On Management

Posted on by

At breakfast Grandma said, “When we’re done eating we’re all going to work together to clean up the house.”  About 45 minutes later the 4 year old asks, “Why is grandpa on his computer instead of cleaning?  Is he the manager?”  I totally wish I could make this stuff up.

For the record grandpa did help with the cleaning.

On Being Herod the Not So Great

Posted on by

One of the things that’s fun about being part of a church body is that for some reason there tends to be a propensity for church plays around Christmas.  I don’t blame the Baptists, but I think that somewhere along the line, they got really good at bigger and bigger productions.  If Steven Spielberg wasn’t a Jew, he’d be a Baptist pastor of drama or some such thing.  I’m not here to talk about Baptists or Jews, but tonight I got to play the brief part of Herod.  I was asked to be Herod, the nasty ruler of the Jewish part of Rome who ordered lots of dead infants and children and generally was not a good guy.

It turns out that I’m too jovial and happy.  Herod was probably selfish, egotistical, and much more middle-eastern.  I’m probably selfish (but less so), egotistical (but less so), and I’m rather white and northern European.  Between those similarities and differences I can tell you that I pretty much did NOT embody the persona of Herod.  I could not pull off mean and angry.  Not a bit.  I was too much of a grinner [I was told].  I wasn’t even trying to grin, thinking about grinning, or even aware that I was grinning.  But apparently I grinned my face off.  Apparently the order to destroy all the males two and under was not convincing despite my best effort.

I’m totally OK with this.  I’m glad I failed at being nasty.  I will sleep well tonight knowing that I stink at being wicked and evil in an overt way.  Of course that means I’m probably just a quieter, more devious sort of bad guy, but we knew that already, too.  Ever since elementary school I was good at scheming bad things for others to do.  I rarely got in trouble because its hard to get caught when someone else is doing the dirty work.  I don’t blame the Baptists for this either.  Be stinky at being little Herods, its probably better for you anyway.

Filters & Feathers

Posted on by

I am not lying to you when I say I have bought a new filter for my shop-vac.  That’s right, I have a shop-vac with a new filter and I am ready to use it.  I am ready to make that filter wish it was never born.  It will be like so many washed up Hollywood starlettes wishing that it had stopped sniffing in the powder that I am about to rub off of my walls in an attempt to make them look nice.  The walls will be drywalls, but the shop-vac is a wet-dry shop-vac so I could in theory saturate the walls with water and the vacuum would still work!  Of course a house with saturated walls is not a house, its a home for Sponge Bob Squarepants.  Given the past owner’s penchant for hacks, shortcuts and setting up electrical situations that are sure to start a fire, I think I’ll keep the walls dry.

I’m trying to wrap up the wall work so that when my in-laws come next week for Christmas festivities we all enjoy time together and not working to wrap up the wall work.  In some countries this is unheard of, but mostly because they have not knocked the non-existent wall out from between their non-existent two rooms.  With that in mind, be like congress and stimulate someone’s economy like Cash for Clunkers, only because there are folks in need of chickens we’ll call it Cash for Cluckers.  Take some time to look around the World Vision site and buy a goat, some chickens, sheep, or even help fund a well.  I’d much rather have water be able to get into their lives through a well and have the problem of needing a wet-dry vac.

Speaking of which, does Dyson make a sand sucker?  Because I’m thinking in some of the places I’ve seen pictures of they need that.  Wait, they don’t have electricity… ZAP!!

R.I.P. Old Mr. Coffee

Posted on by

Our drip coffee maker, which I believe we purchased in late 2001 B.C. has finally made its last cup of coffee.  Its been next to the toaster for too long, and I think it rubbed off on it, so its toast, too.  We’ve purchased a new Mr. Coffee that does about 6 things that the old coffee maker doesn’t do, but they both have the same purpose: baking coffee.  All day long, slowly evaporating the liquid until there is a coffee cake at the bottom of the pot.  A cake you should never, ever eat.  But made of coffee.  At least the new guy will make my mother-in-law happy for about two seconds until she realizes that its inferior to the Bunn that she has at home.  The new coffee pot will probably make coffee in about 3-4 minutes while her Bunn has it ready before you finish thinking you’d like coffee.  It’s that fast.  R.I.Parts Mr. Coffee.  We won’t miss you since you’ve been replaced