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The third love language is receiving gifts.

If your love language is receiving gifts, you consider all gifts as tangible expressions of love from the other person. When you receive a gift, you know that the person was thinking of you and the gift is a symbol of that thought. It does not have to be expensive to satisfy you, of course. For you, it is the thought that counts. If your loved one has purchased, found or made something that is meaningful for you, it makes you feel loved.

If your loved one’s love language is receiving gifts, you do need to invest some effort, time and possibly some money in finding a gift that tells them that you know them and what is meaningful to them.

If your love language is quality time, you need the other to be present and available for you without distractions. You need time and attention from your loved one in order to feel loved.

Sharing meaningful conversation fills you up and doing things together increases the love that you have for the other. Your idea of a perfect evening is reading a relationship book together and discussing it.

If your spouse’s love language is quality time, please stop doing things for them and being so busy you don’t spend time with them.

Stop vacuuming and go sit on the sofa with them.

Seriously!

Last week, we started talking about the http://amzn.to/2ujhKy85 Love Languages. This week, we will explore them a little.

The first love language is Words of Affirmation.

If your love language is words of affirmation, you need to hear love and appreciation expressed. You need to be verbally encouraged and assured of another’s love. Seeing it in action is not enough for you. Hearing about the other’s love and appreciation for you makes it real.

If your loved one’s love language is words of affirmation, please don’t assume that they know you love them. They need to hear it.

Compliment them, appreciate them and let them hear you praise them in front of others.

Oh, and criticism from you really hurts. So please stop!

In a close relationship, have you ever felt that there is so much love between you but that the two of you just don’t "get" each other? That you are trying hard to express your love and the other just doesn’t get it? (and very often the other person feels exactly the same way . . .)

This is a common experience in intimate relationships and according to Dr. Gary Chapman, it is because the both of you are speaking different love languages.

He writes that it is possible for couples to love each other, but to feel unloved because they give and receive love differently, i.e. they don’t share the same primary emotional love language. After 30 years of marriage counselling, Chapman concluded that there are five (and only five) love languages, though there are many "dialects" within these 5 languages.

(In case you are skeptical, his book The Five Love Languages has been on the New York Times Best Seller list since August 2009)

So what are the love languages? They are words...

The difference between happy and miserable couples is not that the former don’t argue or fight. What keeps some couples happy is that they learn to make and accept repairs in the middle of an argument.

Couples who are high conflict and distressed on the other hand, never concede a point to their partner. One or both of them have the need to be right – often at the cost of the relationship.

If the couple under discussion learnt to concede a point to the other, here is what their conversation might sound like:

She: [Still calming down from the "you’re not firm enough" side-issue. Considers arguing with whether she needs to be "10% firmer," but thinks better of it.]
You’re right, I did say I’d keep things cleaner. I didn’t realize you only care about the living room. That’s doable. But I have to tell you, I want more respect about how I do discipline her, and how hard it is to be on top of her mess making all day.

Notice that this couple is...

When things get heated up, it is tempting to make demands from, and threats to, the other person.

When the husband demands Leave my family out of this! The wife is more likely to focus on the threat to her autonomy from this demand and it is very likely to divert attention from the topic at hand.

Similarly, when we make threats, empty or real, (Or I’ve about had it!) it sends the other person into defense mode, their thinking brain shuts down and they are actually incapable of hearing the underlying message or need.

What could this couple do instead?

If they were mindful of their communication, their reactions and the words that they spoke, here is what the conservation might sound like.

He: [Wants to fire back but has learned that the impulse to do so is actually a kind of big, flashing warning in his mind to PAUSE AND BUY SOME TIME until he has calmed down] Hmmm. Let me think about that for a minute. [Discreetly takes a few big breaths. Thinks about whether he’s gone...

One of the most effective ways to start and keep a fight going is to insult the other person and launch a character attack.

For example, the wife in the example said Such a jerk to her husband when they started arguing about the mess.

Long after an argument is over, such insults linger in the mind and keep burning like a mixture of emotional glue and gasoline. So damaging are such insults, that frequent use of such language qualifies as emotional abuse, a grinding assault on the other person’s sense of worth.

The husband in the example reacted to this with his own character attack on his wife when he said: You can’t talk without getting hysterical.

The use of the word hysterical to describe her behaviour was an attack on her character rather than a comment on her behaviour.
She can do little to change his opinion of what constitutes hysteria.

If he had said, on the other hand, Please lower your voice. It is hard for me to hear what you are saying when you raise your...

One of the worst things we can do when someone makes a complaint in a relationship is to minimize it, or even worse, to mock the complaint by our words or actions.

When the wife in the scenario that we are discussing complained that the husband does not help with cleaning up the mess, he minimized and mocked her complaint by picking up one tiny thing and then saying: There,I helped. Now are you happy?

This is an example of Reductio ad absurdem "Reducing to absurdity" which deflates others by making their wish, complaint, or idea sound silly or foolish.

We can also minimize a complaint by saying something like: Why are you making such a big deal about something so little?

Not only is this kind of response to a complaint minimizing and hurtful, it devalues our partner and what is important to them.

Not a great way to build a relationship.

If you wanted to repair the interaction on the other hand, try understanding the meaning and feeling behind the complaint instead.

The first issue with the exchange is leading with the negative. The husband made his entrance and said "What a mess"!

Dr. John Gottman, the renowned relationship expert, believes that if the start-up of a conversation is harsh, the conversation will go downhill from there and will generally not end well. If the first statement is negative, the other person will feel attacked and go into defence mode.

What could the husband have done instead?
He could have started by connecting first.

Here is what it would look like:

He: [Walks through the front door. Sees the mess, feels like grumbling, but thinks better of it. Takes a big breath. Kisses wife on the cheek, picks up his daughter and jiggles her in his arms while she giggles and makes him laugh. Smiles at wife.] How’d it go? [They chat for a few minutes. He says something nice about what she did that day. There’s a pause, and he takes the plunge.] I don’t want to hassle you, but could we talk about the clutter?

...

Whether a relationship is strong, fulfilling and healthy (or not) depends to a significant amount, on the quality of the daily interactions between the people who form the relationship.

What happens during these interactions and communication exchanges on a day to day basis determines the emotional climate of the relationship over time which in turn determines whether or not the people in the relationship feel connected and happy.

Having positive interactions and good communication does not mean that the relationship is free of conflict. Relationship experts agree that to have a relationship free of (apparent) conflict is neither desirable nor healthy. In fact, many would argue that the presence of conflict is an opportunity to grow as an individual and for the relationship to become more intimate as well.

The conflict, does of course, need to be handled skillfully in order for this to happen.

Let’s take a common example from family life to understand this better. The...