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If gifts aren’t your love language, you need to learn it.
Gary Chapman’s 1992 book The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate sold over 12 million copies and transformed the way people see love. We each have our particular way of expressing love, and we’re better at certain styles than others. The ability to both give and receive in a loving way is especially relevant at this gift-intensive time of year. If you’re the type to run straight for the bestsellers, hit the pause button. Before shopping for gifts for your wife, read on to discover what the receiving gifts love language means for you and your partner.
First, a brief review of the five love languages:
Physical Touch includes giving and receiving love through things like cuddling, holding hands, kissing, and sex.
Quality Time involves spending meaningful moments together, like a sit-down dinner or a hike in the woods.
Acts of Service means you show your love by being helpful, such as cleaning out the basement, doing the laundry, or making breakfast.
Words of Affirmation demonstrate your love through verbal kindness and compliments.
Gift Giving denotes our ability to offer and accept presents graciously, whether we’re talking fancy pearls (https://www.thepearlsource.com/bestsellers) or a simple card.
Couples often speak different love languages and it’s quite common for partners to have different ideas about how they prefer to express love. This doesn’t mean you’re incompatible, but it does mean you’ll need to put a little effort into understanding the other person’s perspective. The payoff is definitely worth the investment. Learning to speak your partner’s love language nurtures a deeper knowledge of one another. (It can also help cut down on arguments.)
Of all the love languages, gift-giving is probably the most often misinterpreted. The person who loves receiving gifts might come across as greedy, or as if the thing matters more than the person offering it. This is not what’s going on. People who enjoy receiving gifts means they like having a concrete object as proof of affection. It could be a whimsical $2 plastic keychain or it could be a new car, but the message is the same: “You are always on my mind.”
Gifts are more important to some people than to others. How do you know if gifts is your partner’s love language? It’s very common for us to use the love language that we ourselves prefer. If you mention a coworker sharing some delicious Italian cookies at work and your partner buys some at a bakery for you the next day, that’s a clue that gifts is their love language. On the other hand, people who demonstrate embarrassment when gifts are presented usually means this isn’t their love language.
Appreciation of a gift should not be based on the amount spent; what matters is the sentiment behind the item. It is crucial to understand that what the person is telling you is, “When I saw this, I thought of you.”
Regardless of whether gifts are your love language, it’s important to learn how to accept with tact. At a bare minimum, this means a heartfelt “Thank you” along with loving eye contact. You should also wear, use, display and/or tell others about the item. What matters is not the thing itself. It is simply a concrete reminder that the person loves you.
As with most things, everyone improves with practice. Even if you aren’t a gifter, you can get better at dealing with them. It will take a little thought and effort, but it doesn’t have to be labor-intensive or expensive. And by trying out your partner’s perspective, you can gain new insights into how they feel.
5-Day Love Language Challenge
Your challenge is to come up with a small gift for your partner for five days. This exercise allows you to test out all the love languages, and you’ll get to see which are your dominant ones. The gifts shouldn’t take you too far out of your regular routine, and you should spend less than $10 on each.
The first day, pick something related to one of your first dates. It could be as simple as holding hands as you stroll through a park or cuddling on the couch as you rewatch the first movie you saw together.
Day two is about an act of service. Make their morning coffee. Turn on their car and de-ice the windshield. Do any chore they would normally handle.
For the third gift, write a poem on their name like this:
A is for all the amazing acts you accomplish every day;
N is for your naturally curly hair that is totally noble and maybe even Neo-classical;
N is also for how nutty, novel, and noteworthy you are, and
E is for how excellent you make Eggs Benedict.
Silly? Yes, but also utterly charming. If writing poetry isn’t your style, pick up a greeting card or other written memento that expresses your feelings.
For your fourth gift, prepare or buy your partner’s favorite drink. Extra points for serving it in a special holder, such as an Irish coffee cup or hammered Moscow Mule mug.
Your final assignment is to find something special in the junk drawer (it can also come from the couch cushions, under a car seat, etc.) and offer it as the gift, along with an explanation as to why it relates to your relationship.
By the end of the five days, you should have a better handle on both your and your partner’s preferred love language(s).
Another important thing to keep in mind: if your partner expresses their love through gifts, when you don’t show appreciation, it hurts them more than if their love language were some other type, such as acts of service or words of affirmation. So when you’re on the receiving end, be sure to demonstrate your love by affirming theirs.
While the ideal is to be able to speak all five love languages well, we usually have one or two that are dominant. When you’re dealing with a loved one, it is always worth the effort to increase your fluency in every language of love.
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This content is brought to you by Sue Seabury.
Photo: Shutterstock