Love and Forgiveness

from Modern Love in the New York Times

What a sweet, powerful piece! You must go and read here.

Inevitably, we are different from our beloved, sometimes dramatically so, and these differences tend to get exacerbated under stress - like that of planning a wedding, or traveling abroad. As the author says:

I tend to dash into traffic, thinking I can surely make it to the median. My husband, who was the captain of the patrol boys in the eighth grade, has a tendency to hold out his arms at the curb: stand back!

When such different temperaments come into friction, sparks erupt.

The author explodes with frustration, but then:

Sure, I had tried to do this many times before in our years together, tried to imagine how he felt, but this was different. I was him. And I thought, how awful, how terrible this is, being him. All of my own indignation and all of my poor hurt feelings that had built up through the years were vaporized.

I knew, despite the good and joyful nuggets of our daily life, that it was a difficult — harrowing — proposition for him to live with someone who is so voluble and indiscreet and extravagantly enthusiastic, someone who is always saying “yes, yes, yes!” What a burden it must be, I must be, for someone who is quiet and private and focused, someone so careful in his deliberations.

What a profound realization, knowing that

the temperament of my husband, the temperament of that patrol boy, is my salvation. It is beyond the call of duty and maybe even love that he makes the effort, time and again, to keep me from running into traffic.

I wish such generosity and insight for all of us.

The Language of Love

Back in college, a friend and I developed a rather facetious student-initiated course called The Language of Love. We did this in response to some boys down the hall who had first offered the course, whose subtext was basically 'how to pick up chicks.' We wanted to reclaim some female agency, so our course dealt with meeting and 'acquiring' and 'disposing of' prospective partners (yes, we were definitely callow youth!) from the female point of view.

So that's what I first thought of when I saw this intriguing post over at The Relentless Bride.

But this "Language of Love" is much more subtle and complex than the flirting ideas we were tossing around back in college.

It turns out that we all have preferences in how love is communicated to us, and ours may not be the same as our partner's. I recognized this recently when I swooned after Mr. Barefoot picked up all the dishes and ran the dishwasher... turns out one of my preferred Love Languages is "Acts of Service," according to the little test, linked at the bottom of this post. (I'd have to say that this is doubly so while I try to write my dissertation and just can't deal with a lot of the day-to-day stuff.)

The Five Love Languages

Are Quality Time, Acts of Service, Physical Touch, Receiving Gifts, and Words of Affirmation.

My primary love language is probably
Quality Time
with a secondary love language being
Acts of Service.

Complete set of results

Quality Time:		9
Acts of Service:		7
Physical Touch:		7
Receiving Gifts:		4
Words of Affirmation:		3

Information

Unhappiness in relationships, according to Dr. Gary Chapman, is often due to the fact that we speak different love languages. Sometimes we don't understand our partner's requirements, or even our own. We all have a "love tank" that needs to be filled in order for us to express love to others, but there are different means by which our tank can be filled, and there are different ways that we can express love to others.

Take the quiz