What has to happen for you to feel really loved?� Think back for a moment as to how love was expressed in the family that you grew up in.� If your parents wanted to show love to you or to family members, or to each other, what did they do?
In my family, love didn’t particularly involve a lot of touchy-feely stuff, but it did usually involve vast amounts of food, and on special occasions, special presents. In my family, if you loved someone, you fed them (nearly to death - a biscuit and a cup of tea�was never enough), and on those special occasions, you went out of your way to find a special present.� It was hard after my mother died when I was a teenager.� As I stood beside my father at my mother’s grave, I wanted to hug him but couldn’t (and he would have been embarrassed by that).� We both knew that at the time, love for us wasn’t about touchy-feely.� But I certainly couldn’t cook for him (he had been an industrial caterer).� In my own awkward way, I did�try to�think hard about presents.
In my partner’s family, things were very different.� If you loved someone you starved them because food would make you fat and that was unhealthy - better to keep them hungry because you would live longer.� And presents were ok in theory, but�difficult in practice because it was much better to spend the limited money paying for the shoes and raincoats for the growing number of children.� No, in her family, you loved people in different ways.� There was loads of touchy-feely, and time given in abundance.� People would stop what they were doing and look at you in the face and listen and ask questions and help you to feel the most important person in the universe.
Initially my relationship with my partner was a culture shock.� I missed the food and presents: she missed the touchy-feely and the sense that she was more important than the millions of other things demanding my attention.� It was almost as if we spoke two different languages of love.� It was as if I was speaking love in ‘French’ and she could only understand it in ‘Italian’; and she was speaking ‘Italian’, and I was longing for ‘French’.
The good news is that you can learn to speak a different love language (even if you are English).� When my partner pointed out to me that she needed to ‘hear’ certain things, I learned to do touchy-feely.� It was deliberate and awkward at first, but it felt safe learning with a good, patient, and encouraging tutor.� And with all language learning, you eventually have to leave the safety of the classroom and buy a sandwich and a coffee in the real world.� You have to move outside and listen to your own floundering words bounce around and watch the amused expressions from the natural speakers trying to understand you.��Greeting�my wonderful mother-in-law with a hug and a kiss for the first time was strange, but ok, but doing the same to two sisters-in-law was slightly twitchy, and hugging my father-in-law and brother-in-law was initially very traumatic.� It seems so strange looking back because now I would regard myself as a very fluent speaker of this new language of love.� I can touch and feel with the rest of them.� But it was something that I had to learn - just as my patient tutor had to help me learn that for her, at least, love was spelled T-I-M-E.
I think a lot of couples don’t yet understand that they may be speaking different languages of love to each other.� Like the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians who�lived side by side in Yorkshire in the UK in the tenth century, there was sufficient linguistic overlap for them to be able to make themselves vaguely understood, but there wasn’t the linguistic clarity that would make such a difference.
I suppose that if you begin to realise that you are speaking different languages of love you can either make the effort to learn the new language, or you can go on proclaiming love in the language that your partner doesn’t really understand.� If you choose the latter, you may delude yourself into thinking that you are a good lover - but you are not.
I once knew a lady who had a loving friendship with a shopkeeper.� In her family, one way of showing love was to make cakes for people, and so she started to show love to this man in the way she had learned.� Every week she would bake him a cake and take it to his shop on a Friday.� The trouble was that he hated cake.� Eventually he said to her: “I appreciate your kindness.� But I do not like cake.� Please stop baking them.”� So what did she do?� She kept baking them, and kept bringing them.� She was saying: “I am going to show you love in my language whether you like it or not.”� In the end he just gave them away or put�them in the bin because these baked cakes meant nothing to him.
Find out the language of love your partner speaks, and then ask him or her to be your tutor as you embark on a new learning project.
