During the stay-at-home order last year, we had the opportunity to live-stream the Blended and Blessed marriage conference in April of 2020. This post is part 1 of some of the notes and takeaways we had from the conference.
About the event
The event was put on by Family Life ministries, and there were 4 amazing speakers. Ron Deal is a well-known and influential author, speaker, and counselor who specializes in blended families. Gary Chapman is the author of The Five Love Languages, and has decades of experience working with couples. Laura Petherbridge is a speaker and an author most well-known for the book The Smart Step-Mom. Bill Butterworth is an author and speaker, who has worked with a vast variety of businesses and churches.
Gary Chapman: 5 love languages
First, if you have not read the book “The Five Love Languages”, we cannot recommend it enough. You can explore more about the love languages and take a quiz to help identify yours at www.fivelovelanguages.com
Gary shared that our deepest emotional need is to feel loved by the important people in our lives. The word “love” can be a confusing word because we use the same word to describe how we feel about hot dogs and how we feel about people. We know that the meaning is not exactly the same for both of these, but we still use the same word for them.
As we get in a romantic relationship and fall in love, it starts as an emotional feeling. The emotions stem from their looks, the way they talk to you, and how they look at you.
Our emotions tend to overtake our logic, and we start to see through rose-colored glasses. We overlook their flaws and are blind to them. Gary noted that the lifespan of those emotions lasts about 2 years on average. Many relationships take about 2 years to develop from initial interest to engagement and marriage; which means that those flaws start to become more apparent right before or right after the wedding.
He pointed out our need for intentional love. In this kind of love, we ask ourselves questions like how we can serve our spouse? How can we be a better spouse? How can we make our spouse’s life better? We must make the decision to put them over ourselves. We must choose to think of them instead of only ourselves. We have to ask ourselves what we can do for them instead of focusing on what they should be doing for us. If each person is only thinking of themselves, their marriage will not be healthy.
Love is a necessity in life and in a marriage. How we show and feel love is different for each person, which is how the 5 love languages were developed. Gary explained that in his time working with couples, he started to notice 5 major patterns of how people express and receive love. Each person has a primary love language, even though they still can receive love through others.
Here is a quick overview of those five languages, although we highly recommend also reading the book.
- Words of affirmation: using words to affirm and commend your spouse. Life or death is in the power of the tongue, you can either use your tongue to condemn your spouse or to commend them. For someone with this as their primary language, speaking harshly to them is like stabbing them in the heart. There is always something good to say about your spouse, even if it seems unimportant (like showering every day).
- Gifts: giving gifts shows that the other person is thinking about you. It doesn’t have to be something expensive, or even cost money at all. It could be picking a flower while out on a walk, but it shows that you were thinking of them.
- Acts of service: doing something for the person that you know they would like. It can be cooking, cleaning, or doing dishes. It is the action that speaks louder than words, the action is showing that they care about you.
- Quality time: giving undivided attention while doing something together. Find what your spouse likes doing, and do it with them. Make sure the focus is on the time together though.
- Physical touch: emotions conveyed through touch. Can be sexual or non-sexual touch. This is the reason why we hold babies, and why babies thrive with touch. If your spouse loves sex, but does not appreciate non-sexual touch, this is most likely not their primary love language.
Naturally, we each grow up speaking our own love language as our mother tongue. We will default to our own love language to show love, but if that isn’t how your spouse received love, they will end up with an empty love tank. We can learn to speak other love languages with effort. Even if someone has the same love language as you do, they could still “speak” a different dialect of it. Dialects are like varieties of language, for example a person from the United Kingdom and from the United States may both speak English with different accents, but they also have different vocabulary and phrases. They speak different dialects of English. For love languages, that means 2 people with the love language of quality time may have different interpretations of what quality time means to them. As a second marriage you might need to unlearn some things that worked with your previous spouse and replace it with the new. Even if we are sincerely trying to show love, if we are using our primary language and our spouse speaks another one, it can miss them altogether.
How can you figure out your spouse’s love language? 1. Observe their behavior with you and with others. 2. Listen to what they complain about. 3. Listen to their requests. 4. Take the quiz from the book or the website.
We can also apply love languages to children. How children receive love may change over time as they grow, but also it may be different based on who is showing the love. They may feel love differently from their step-mother than from their mother. As a blended family, the book “Building Love Together In Blended Families” by Ron Deal and Gary Chapman has taken the 5 love languages quizzes for children and adapted them so children can answer the questions specifically for their mom, dad, step-mom, and step-dad. We found this very useful for loving our kids in a way that they can really receive.
In our next post we will share some takeaways from Ron Deals presentation…Stay Tuned!
