Monday, 08 March 2010 12:00 | and posted in Relationships
When you "fall in love" everything changes. Your carefully ordered world is turned upside down and you'll suddenly find yourself acting in ways you've never done before!
Such is the falling in love experience that you'll suddenly find yourself fluent in the majority of the five love languages. Unexpectedly you'll be buying roses or chocolates, offering to carry bags, hugging, kissing and holding hands as often as you can, giving your date as much undivided attention as humanly possible and compliments will simply flow out of your mouth with ease.
When you are in the "in love" stage it doesn't matter what your primary love language is! And this is the issue with the emotional, hormonal, and dare I say it, mating behaviour of human beings.
This period is temporary.
Psychologists tell us that at most it lasts two years. Two years! So when this "honeymoon" period ends so does your love language fluency. You resort back to needing your primary love language spoken most and loudest and you find yourself not caring so much about receiving the others or communicating in the other four love languages. Overnight the flow of compliments dwindle, the undivided attention becomes impractical, and you have to carry your own bags again... etc.
People rarely marry someone with the same primary love language as themselves so a lot of marriages break up due to couples feeling unloved by each other. They expect the person they dated and married to be the same person they are with two years later.
Have you ever heard anyone say we used to hold hands all the time when we were dating and now we're married we never hold hands. Or he used to buy me flowers all the time - well, that stopped once we were married. It's not that the person they married is different as such, it's just that the stage is different and the person is unaware of their spouse's primary love language or indeed their own.
Often couples who are breaking up do love each other it's just that their love is being lost in the translation. The Five Love Languages book by Gary Chapman is full of examples of how marriages on the brink of divorce have been transformed by both the husband and wife learning the other's primary love language and how to speak it.
This is why learning your own love language (even while you are a teenager or single) and that of any current or future prospective spouse will be an invaluable aid in experiencing a healthy, love-filled marriage.
Based upon Dr Gary Chapman's book, The Five Love Languages.
