Skip to main content

The Love Languages



Do you ever feel like someone doesn't care about you? Conversely, have you ever been told by someone that they feel like you don't like them? This can happen quite easily because everyone has a different way of expressing love, and want to receive love in different ways. Dr. Gary Chapman has written about this dilemma and came up with the five love languages. 

1. Words of Affirmation
When people have this as their love language, it means that they feel loved when people express compliments and appreciation verbally. People with this love language might be more likely to write love letters to others and give sincere apologies. 

2. Acts of Service
For this love language, people often do things to ease the burden of others. People with this love language are likely offer to do things for someone or pamper a loved one. They are good at making behaviour changes after a conflict.

3. Quality Time
These people are the type to keep their phone away when they are with you. They are interested in spending time with the ones they love and providing their undivided attention. They are likely to listen with empathy and make eye contact.

4. Giving Gifts
For this love language, people will purchase special, meaningful gifts for the ones they love. They make birthdays special for others and share tokens of their love for someone.

5. Physical Touch
When people have this as their love language, they demonstrate that they care with touch that reinforces one's presence. They are likely to give long hugs, enjoy hand holding, and enjoy being close to other people.

As you can see, these five ways of expressing love are all nice and good, but it is easy to see how we can get caught in the cross-hairs if someone has a different love language than we do. For example, you might be the kind of person to give thoughtful gifts, but your best friend is not. You might be feeling like they don't care as much about you because they forgot about a special occasion. However, they might have the love language of quality time and enjoy creating special moments together, but feel like you don't care because you were checking your phone while you were together. It is important to understand what makes others feel loved so that we can make sure we avoid things that would be especially hurtful for that kind of person.

What kind of love language do you have? What about your family and friends? 
How might this impact the way we show love to others?

Let me know what you think!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creation, Revelation, Redemption

Someone I have come to admire quite a bit is a man named Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. He is an excellent scholar and author. His website releases weekly articles called Covenant and Conversation. In one of theme, it states, " Creation is God’s relationship to the world. Revelation is God’s relationship with us. When we apply revelation to creation, the result is redemption : the world in which God’s will and ours coincide". Our theme over the past months has been "Care for Creation" and we have looked at the majesty of the created world. I enjoy the triad of this relationship by which the created world, humanity, and God come together. Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God in the gospels, and we say in all the time in the Lord's Prayer, "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven".  Again here, we see this link between the kingdom and the will of God. How do we know what God's will is? Take a moment to pray on this. What is God...
Post a Comment
Read more

Faith Development in a Secular World

Everyone experiences faith differently in their lives. It can be unfair to proclaim one's faith as stronger or more serious than another person's since everyone's relationship with God is different. James Fowler wrote about how faith develops throughout our lives and I had the pleasure of reading a lot of his work during my undergraduate degree. I found a graphic that summarizes his stages of faith development to save you four years of intensive study: When we are very young, our idea of faith is quite limited. We copy the things that our parents do, but according to Fowler, we do not really have an understanding of spiritual concepts just yet. Jumping to adolescence, one can see that in the struggle that teens have to form their own identities, they question religious values of their parents and communities. This is a normal part of growing up. We do this in many aspects of our lives, so it would be kind of strange if no teens questions the religious beliefs of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Development of Morality

*Fair warning, this post is different than our normal short articles. It is a paper that I wrote for my undergraduate degree. I hope you enjoy and perhaps think about some things that you would not have thought about otherwise* Development of Morality: Childhood and Faith Development It is not often that one hears or sees something that truly changes their outlook on life or their feelings about their purpose.   I once heard someone explain that there are resume virtues and eulogy virtues.   That is to say, that there are characteristics that people think are important in the moment, or in life, and then there are things that people will actually remember about you.   Your resume virtues are things like being organized or always being on time, but eulogy virtues are things like making people smile and helping out friends.   So how does one learn what these things are? How does one become virtuous, moral or build their conscience?   It is in childhoo...
Post a Comment
Read more