How The Five Love Languages Saved My Marriage | St. Louis Wedding Photographer

How the 5 Love Languages Saved My Marriage

The five love languages saved my marriage.  Sounds pretty dramatic, huh?

I know one language. English.  I took Spanish all 4 years of high school, and could maybe still ask you what your name is, count to 10, and say please and thank you.  But that’s about it.  It’s safe to say, if you were speaking to me in any language other than English, I wouldn’t have a clue what you were saying.  We’d probably have to communicate by playing charades, or drawing pictures. And even then, I can’t draw or act.  So it would be all on you.  And that’s not really communicating at all.

Any idea where I’m going with this?

In my opinion, good communication is one of the most important things in any relationship.

But, also in my opinion, communication is one of the hardest things to figure out!  You may speak the same language, but not really be speaking the same language! But what does that even mean?!!

Let me paint you a picture…

We hadn’t even been married a year and Jesse was working full time, and in school at night.  I wanted to do something sweet for him for our first Valentine’s Day together as a married couple.  So, while Jesse was at work, I cut out a bunch of construction paper hearts, wrote sweet things on them and taped them all over the inside of his truck.  The dashboard, windows and steering wheel were covered in heart shaped love notes from me.  And just in case that wasn’t enough love, I completely filled the inside of the truck with pink and red balloons, that also had love notes written on them!  I knew exactly what time he needed to leave work to get to class.  So I waited, fully expecting a call the minute he saw his truck.

The call did not come.  I waited a little longer, and knew he was in class at this point.  Now I was just getting mad.  Like, seriously? There was NO way he missed the balloons and hearts.  He’ll call after class.  I couldn’t take it.  I broke, and called him.  He answered the phone as he was getting in his truck to drive home.  I played it cool, and he proceeded to tell me about this test he’d just taken, that he didn’t think he did very well on.  You have GOT to be kidding me!  When he finished talking about that dang test, I calmly asked him if he had gotten the love notes and balloons I left for him.  To which he responded something along the lines of:

“Yeah! And I was almost late to class because I had to pop all the balloons before I could get in the truck! I was kind of annoyed! I was already running late, and the balloons were in my way!”

Um, what?

This was a Valentine’s Day that we would never forget.

And probably one of our biggest fights to date.  We fought in circles all night.  I couldn’t believe he didn’t call me and thank me, and tell me how wonderful I am.  And he kept telling me that he didn’t need me to do things like that to show him I loved him.  In all the hours of talking and arguing and crying, we were STILL not communicating.  Eventually he did apologize for hurting my feelings, but he never really understood why they were all that hurt to begin with.

But we survived.  And forgave each other.  We still loved each other.  And you better believe the next Valentine’s Day there were no construction paper hearts OR balloons.

Unfortunately, over the next couple of years, our arguments and fights kept repeating the same pattern.  And it boiled down to total miscommunication and zero understanding on either side.  We were trying to communicate our feelings, but it wasn’t good communication.  And we were headed for disaster if something didn’t change.  Luckily, we both really wanted something to change together, so that we could move forward, together.  Because we loved each other.  Even when we’d argue, we held onto that love.

The Five Love Languages

We were desperate, but didn’t even really know we were. And then we came across The Five Love Languages.  It was heaven sent, and exactly what we needed.  It’s like we finally had an interpreter for our language barrier.  Only our problem wasn’t with spoken language, it was with the language of the heart.  Our hearts were speaking completely different languages, and completely exhausted from trying to communicate to each other!

If you haven’t heard of The Five Love Languages, I HIGHLY recommend taking the time to educate yourself!  There’s a book, a website and a quiz.  Start with the website, then take the quiz.  This will give you a good solid base.  Then the book adds to your base and makes it even stronger.

Here’s the basic idea.  There are 5 different languages of love: Acts of Service, Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Physical Touch and Gift Giving.  And each of these languages is how we communicate or feel love.  AND, here’s the kicker, you tend to feel love the same way you show love.

You tend to feel love the same way you show love.

This was game changing.  It was like an enormous light bulb turned on and everything made sense!  We’d taken the quiz to determine our personal love language, and we had DIFFERENT languages!  It’s like my heart was speaking English, and Jesse’s was speaking Spanish! And no matter what either one of us said or did, it was being understood!

So, the solution was simple.  We needed to learn to speak each other’s love language.  It wasn’t an easy solution, but it was simple.  And that was literally all it took.  There was so much love between us, that was getting lost in translation, or not even translated at all!  And now, we both had this determination to speak each other’s love language so that we could each feel that love we had for each other.

This moment of clarity was 9 years ago.  And our love has only grown, and gotten stronger.  Every now and then we have to remind each other to speak the right language, but it works!  It works, because it makes sense.  And that’s what we needed…we needed to make sense of each other!

 

Check out My Love Story Series for all the juicy details on how I met and fell in love with my husband in the first place!

 

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