Your love language rules a huge part of your emotional life.
When you are feeling loved and handing out love, you are on top of the world and you feel invincible, creative, and you can be your best self. I’m quite certain love is the antidote to almost everything.
When you aren’t feeling loved you feel bitter, resentful, and angry.
Someone who doesn’t understand your love language can bring up those feelings in you completely unintentionally.
You can have a mixture of love languages, or you can be very strong in one, but not the others.
One of my stronger love languages is Acts of Service. This means I express love by doing things for other people. Cooking a big thanksgiving dinner is one of them.
And when I do my Acts of Service it makes sense to me that other people will feel really loved by all of my dedication and hard work to prep the meal. It seems to me that when they get there, they will be pitching in and helping out and in my mind it will become a lovely team effort and we all feel very loved and grateful by the end.
But not everyone has the same love language as I do. When we come together and I keep doing all of the work by myself I start to feel unloved and I feeling angry and resentful. Out of this resentment and brewing anger, I might say something unkind to someone who’s love language is Words of Affirmation.
The person who’s love language is Words of Affirmation has probably been cheering me on the whole way because that is how they show love – I haven’t even noticed it because I’m busy showing love by doing the Act of Service. Now they begin to feel angry and resentful because I didn’t affirm them and tell them they were so great because I don’t think they are that great if they aren’t helping me.
Pretty soon we are all just a touch angry and bit resentful and nobody is feel thankful and we go home exhausted and upset with each other.
But once you know your love language you can begin to see how these situations play out.
You can honor your love language once you know what it is. Then you can make choices based on how much love you want to dish out, instead of trying to receive love in return.
You can take a quiz to find yours out here. I’ve learned mine and others by simply paying attention to when I feel loved and when I feel resentment. Quite often this is simply a love language at work, or a love language miscommunication.