The 5 Love Languages Military Edition: The Secret to Love That Lasts (15 page)
Read The 5 Love Languages Military Edition: The Secret to Love That Lasts Online
Authors: Gary Chapman,Jocelyn Green
Tags: #Religion, #Christian Life, #Love & Marriage
1. As you walk from the car to go shopping, reach out and hold your spouse’s hand.
2. While eating together, let your knee or foot drift over and touch your spouse.
3. Walk up to your spouse and say, “Have I told you lately that I love you?” Take her in your arms and hug her while you rub her back and continue. “You are the greatest!” (Resist the temptation to rush to the bedroom.) Untangle yourself and move on to the next thing.
4. While your spouse is seated, walk up behind her and give her a shoulder massage.
5. When you sit together in church, when the minister calls for prayer, reach over and hold your spouse’s hand.
6. Initiate sex by giving your spouse a foot massage. Continue to other parts of the body as long as it brings pleasure to your spouse.
7. When family or friends are visiting, touch your spouse in their presence. A hug, running your hand along his or her arm, putting your arm around him as you stand talking, or simply placing your hand on her shoulder can earn double emotional points. It says, “Even with all these people in our house, I still see you.”
8. When your spouse arrives at home, meet him or her one step earlier than usual and give your mate a big welcome home. The point is to vary the routine and enhance even a small “touching experience.”
Spouses whose primary love language is physical touch have a difficult time feeling loved during deployments. As with the quality time love language, you may want to increase your efforts on your spouse’s secondary love language to help compensate for the deficit he or she feels while apart. Also try the following suggestions.
1. When talking or emailing, say things like, “I wish I could give you a big hug right now,” or, “If I were with you, I’d give you a back massage to ease some of the tension away.”
2. Send pictures of yourself to your spouse at various times while apart. Being able to hold a photo of you becomes very important when holding you in person is impossible.
3. Next time you have your hair cut, save a lock of it and send it to your spouse.
4. Spray some perfume or cologne you normally wear on a card or piece of fabric and send it to your spouse. Wives, be sure to seal your card with a kiss (wear some lipstick when you do this).
5. Trace your hand on paper and mail it to your spouse. He or she can high-five it or lay a hand on it to help feel connected to you.
6. Service members, arrange for a professional massage for your spouse at home. When you’re not around, your spouse may go for weeks or months without human touch.
7. Send handwritten letters. Unlike emails, these are tangible pieces of your love that your spouse can touch.
8. Wives at home, if physical touch is your love language, try wearing a special clothing item of your husband’s with his cologne placed on it. Marlene said, “I have developed a tradition of wearing my husband’s denim shirt or robe around the house while my husband is away. It feels like he is hugging me when I wear it.”
9. More tips for the spouse at home with a physical touch love language: Use a heated blanket on the empty side of the bed, so the bed won’t feel cold. Sleep with pillows next to you so you don’t get used to having the bed all to yourself. Spray a small amount of your spouse’s cologne or perfume on the pillowcase or a sachet you place inside it. Don’t replace the empty spot with a child or your child will get used to sleeping there. When your spouse returns home, your child might become fearful or resent him or her for taking his or her space in your bed.
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Scramblers
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ome aspects of military life make it especially challenging to interpret and express love. These are love language scramblers, the experiences that can cause mixed signals and tangled lines of communication. Let’s look at just a few of these together.
Service members are trained to operate in a hierarchy, to take orders and give them, to complete missions. Emotions are irrelevant, and order and obedience are critical for the military to function. But in marriage, the military style of communication can drown out any love language.
“My instructions during my time overseas were simple: do your job, and do it now,” said Vernon. “I became good at it, and enjoyed the time, because my schedule was often predictable, and my training sufficient to handle most pressures I faced.”
But when he came home and tried the same approach to meet his wife, Jackie’s, love language, his mission failed. “At work, when given an order or task, the expectation is that it gets done with little to no delay; this laser focus is necessary in meeting mission assignments. I call this ‘running sprints’ in relationship building. It took me a long time to understand that relationship building at home is more of a marathon. I needed to slow down on my approach and understand that once a ‘task’ has been completed at home, there are many other skills that need to be developed, like becoming an empathetic listener, and speaking my wife and children’s love language. This for me was a new type of training that would be a lifetime of practice, making mistakes, learning from them, and trying again.”
Military training, to obey orders without reference to your emotions, can be extremely helpful in speaking your spouse’s love language. You don’t need warm feelings to do acts of service or words of affirmation. Love begins with an attitude, moves to actions, and often stimulates positive emotions.
Separations can mask a person’s love language simply because of the limits they impose on time spent together. Vernon and Jackie spent most of their engagement on two different continents, and, due to a deployment, didn’t live together until six months into their marriage. During that time, neither realized their primary love languages were as far apart as their zip codes.
After redeployment, however, it became painfully clear.
“One day Vernon surprised me by coming home from work for lunch,” said Jackie. “When I heard the door, I ran to hide in the closet so I could surprise and seduce him. When I jumped out, I was the one in for a surprise. He felt so unloved by the dirty dishes and clutter he saw that he was not ‘in the mood.’ Vernon turned around and left, confused, angry, and discouraged.” Finally, it clicked for Jackie. “Vernon’s love language is acts of service, and mine is quality time.”
Five children later, the chaos in the household bothered Vernon much more than it bothered Jackie. Though Vernon helped with household duties as much as he could, the chaos that remained left him feeling tired, frustrated, and unwilling to give his wife the time and words she craved. “Sad to say, it was often a relief to go on multiple-day field exercises and deployments to get away from the pressures of daily trying to please my wife,” Vernon said.
It’s easy to see separations as time off from loving one’s spouse the way they want to be loved, but the need for love does not go away. The key is learning to speak each other’s language when you are together and then learning to speak it when apart.
Though it has taken years to learn to read him better, Jackie now knows how to speak Vernon’s language. “Recently, I stayed up all night to clean the house to demonstrate my love for him, and it changed the entire climate of our home in minutes after he saw what had been done.”
Dual military couples have the added challenge of juggling two sets of orders. When Carmen and Garrett were dating, both were active duty with overlapping deployments. Sometimes, they were literally two ships passing in the night, inbound and outbound in the Boston Harbor ship channel. “Those were tough days,” said Carmen. “We weren’t together long enough to get used to being together, and there was always another deployment hanging over our heads. We fought a lot. Not quite constantly, but we weren’t married yet. I often wondered if we’d make it that far.”
Eventually they discovered
The 5 Love Languages
and realized that in the limited time they did have together, their love was lost in translation. With short intervals together, each of them standing duty one or more days per week, and under pressure to earn qualifications, there was very little time to fill each other’s “love tank.” When they were together, they spoke the love language that came most naturally—their own. “But he didn’t want a new shirt or something useful for his kitchen,” said Carmen. “He wanted me to hold his hand and affirm him. And I would have been happy to know he was thinking of me while he was bouncing around those Caribbean islands, even if all he brought me was a shell necklace. Once we knew how the other ‘heard’ love, we could be more deliberate in how we spoke love to one another.” Carmen and Garrett have now been married for fifteen years.
Learning to speak each other’s love language can keep love alive even when we are worlds apart physically.