#OurRelations – Love languages
One of the biggest challenges we had at the beginning of our relation, causing millions of arguments and fights, often hidden behind a curtain of little facts, was the difference in expressing love. For the first few years we both had times in which we felt unloved or not loved enough, which was completely not true as we loved each other a lot! But we had very different ways of expressing it, which come with a biased view about how love should be expressed to us.
For Andrea touch is absolutely crucial. He needs his dose of caresses and kisses to feel cared about. Anna is not a touch person. She is not used to small strokes, and even more, when she is focused on something a caress brings rather irritation than pleasure. What she needs is appreciation. But not simple words, like "you are doing great". She needs her work and development to be noticed seriously, successes and positive feedback from heart is a crucial element of growth and love for her, which doesn't come naturally to Andrea. Quite the opposite, for some time he tried to strengthen Anna by not giving her the appreciation she was longing for!
All this seems quite obvious today, but it took us several years to discover it. For long, long time we couldn't understand what was wrong. Why one of us was getting frustrated, what she or he meant by "not being loved" if we love her or him a lot and we do show it?!? But we used to show it the way it was natural to us, not the way the other person needed. In other words, Andrea showed his love by caressing Anna, while Anna expressed her feelings through appreciation and it didn't really work out. Because those were our needs, not the needs of the other person. It's so difficult to understand that we differ from that point of view. That we have different love languages.
Not long time ago we came across the concept of the 5 Love Languages. It confirmed with a very simple test what we needed few years to discover – that each of us has their own Love Language and it is important not only to recognize our language, but also the one of those we love, being our partner, children, etc. We did the test proposed on their website and with no surprise we got the result we already knew: Andrea's first love language is Physical Touch, while Anna's Words of Appreciation. Fortunately, we have in common the second language: Quality Time. Have a look yourself, it may really save you some years of unnecessary fights in you relation: https://www.5lovelanguages.com/.
And let us know how did it go! What is your Love Language?