Learning Love Language At Home

This weekend my twelve-year-old daughter and I are going shopping. While this might not seem like a big deal to some, it is an event for us that has been marked on the calendar in big red letters. Between her theater schedule, her siblings’ schedules and my own, carving out a whole weekend afternoon for just the two of us seems like nothing short of a miracle. But I know how important this is to her; I see the excitement shining in her eyes. I know this will be an afternoon that is about a lot more than buying clothes and experimenting with makeup. This time together is going to be a time for speaking my precious daughter’s love language.

I first heard of the concept of love languages while attending a parenting seminar years ago. Taken from the book The Five Love Languages, by Gary Chapman, this concept revolutionized the way I viewed my husband, family members and children. I began to see certain things about them that I had missed before. Where in the past I had found them insensitive or unresponsive, I had a light bulb moment in simply realizing that I had not been speaking their love language and they had not been speaking mine. While I still had quite a bit to learn, this was a significant beginning for me.

It was easy for me to pinpoint my love language as I scanned the five choices. I needed only to dig into the past and picture my mother. She had done an excellent job of cultivating my love language (quality time) while seamlessly blending it with hers (gift giving). How? By taking me shopping. As we spent many hours at the mall, walking and eating and talking, she was filling up my love tank. While passers-by might have thought we were just another mother and daughter frivolously spending money, we were in fact making investments in our relationship that would last a lifetime. As I remembered those shopping trips from my turbulent teenage years, I knew that my love language had been discovered then and has never changed. My husband knows that the way he can speak volumes of love to me is to spend time with me—whether taking a walk or eating slowly at a restaurant, the point is to just treasure the time to talk and share from our hearts.

Now that I am all grown up with six children of my own, my opportunities for quality time are severely limited. But that doesn’t stop my mother from expressing her gift giving love language every chance she gets. My mother never comes to my house with empty hands. She might have a spatula she found because she knows I melted mine, a shirt she saw that she knew I would like, or some other little trinket she knows will bless me or brighten my day. Sometimes my husband rolls his eyes and calls these little gifts “junk.” But I know better. I know she is saying loud and clear, I love you in the best way she knows how. What’s more, I know that I can make her day by doing the same for her—picking up a candle she would like, or a piece of stationary with her name on it, even a cute magnet for her refrigerator. I don’t have to spend a fortune, I just have to show her: I thought of you today and I love you. Here’s the proof.

Those years of shopping with my mom were actually years of love language training and I didn’t even know it. My challenge now is to continue to apply these lessons as I relate to my own children in a way that will resonate with them. I recognize that we may not all speak the same love language—but real love is about being willing to speak someone else’s love language, even when it feels foreign to you. And like any foreign language, you can only learn someone’s love language with consistent practice. My mom has inspired me to find my children’s love language and speak it to them loud and clear. Whether I am making my oldest son his favorite meal, spending time alone with my daughter or giving my middle son an extra hug in the midst of a busy day, I am learning to be intentional in my expression of their love languages, different as they all are. Through gift giving, quality time, acts of service, physical touch and affirming words, I can reach out to them and give them the same foundation I was given: a love that is irreplaceable and irrepressible. It is not enough, I know, to just say I love you. I have to show it in a way that will speak to their hearts. My mother taught me that.