by Gary Chapman
I listened as she described their twelve years of marriage. It was a story I had heard many times before. They had an exciting courtship, got married at the height of the in-love experience, had the typical adjustments in the early days of marriage, and pursued the American dream. In due time, they came down off the emotional high of the in-love experience but did not learn to speak each other’s love language sufficiently. She had lived with a love tank only half full for the last several years, but she had received enough expressions of love to make her think that everything was okay. However, his love tank was empty.
I told Becky that I would see if Brent would talk with me. I told Brent on the phone, “As you know, Becky came to see me and told me about her struggle with what is happening in the marriage. I want to help her, but in order to do so, I need to know what you are thinking.”
He agreed readily, and now he sat in my office. His outward appearance was in stark contrast to Becky’s. She had been weeping copiously, but he was stoic. I had the impression, however, that his tears had been shed weeks or perhaps months before and that it had been an inward weeping. The story Brent told confirmed my hunch.
“I just don’t love her anymore,” he said. “I haven’t loved her for a long time. I don’t want to hurt her, but we are not close. Our relationship has become empty. I don’t enjoy being with her anymore. I don’t know what happened. I wish it were different, but I don’t have any feelings for her.”
Brent was thinking and feeling what hundreds of thousands of husbands have thought and felt through the years. It’s the “I don’t love her anymore” mind-set that gives men the emotional freedom to seek love with someone else. The same is true for wives who use the same excuse.
I sympathized with Brent, for I have been there. Thousands of husbands and wives have been there—emotionally empty, wanting to do the right thing, not wanting to hurt anyone, but being pushed by their emotional need to seek love outside the marriage. Fortunately, I had discovered in the earlier years of my own marriage the difference between the in-love experience and the emotional need to feel loved. Most in our society have not yet learned that difference.
The in-love experience that we discussed in chapter 3 is on the level of instinct. It is not premeditated; it simply happens in the normal context of male-female relationships. It can be fostered or quenched, but it does not arise by conscious choice. It is short-lived (usually two years or less) and seems to serve for humankind the same function as the mating call of the Canada goose.
The in-love experience temporarily meets one’s emotional need for love. It gives us the feeling that someone cares, that someone admires us and appreciates us. Our emotions soar with the thought that another person sees us as number one, that he or she is willing to devote time and energies exclusively to our relationship. For a brief period, however long it lasts, our emotional need for love is met. Our tank is full; we can conquer the world. Nothing is impossible. For many individuals, it is the first time they have ever lived with a full emotional tank, and the feeling is euphoric.
In time, however, we come down from that natural high back to the real world. If our spouse has learned to speak our primary love language, our need for love will continue to be satisfied. If, on the other hand, he or she does not speak our love language, our tank will slowly drain, and we will no longer feel loved. Meeting that need in one’s spouse is definitely a choice. If I learn the emotional love language of my spouse and speak it frequently, she will continue to feel loved. When she comes down from the obsession of the in-love experience, she will hardly even miss it because her emotional love tank will continue to be filled. However, if I have not learned her primary love language or have chosen not to speak it, when she descends from the emotional high, she will have the natural yearnings of unmet emotional needs. After some years of living with an empty love tank, she will likely “fall in love” with someone else, and the cycle will begin again.
Meeting my wife’s need for love is a choice I make each day.
Meeting my wife’s need for love is a choice I make each day. If I know her primary love language and choose to speak it, her deepest emotional needs will be met and she will feel secure in my love. If she does the same for me, my emotional needs are met and both of us live with a full tank. In a state of emotional contentment, both of us will give our creative energies to many wholesome projects outside the marriage while we continue to keep our marriage exciting and growing.
With all of that in my mind, I looked back at the deadpan face of Brent and wondered if I could help him. I knew in my heart that he was probably already involved with another in-love experience. I wondered if it was in the beginning stages or at its height. Few men, suffering from an empty emotional love tank, leave their marriage until they have prospects of meeting that need somewhere else.
Brent was honest and revealed that he had been in love with someone else for several months. He had hoped that the feelings would go away and that he could work things out with his wife. But things at home had gotten worse, and his love for the other woman had increased. He could not imagine living without his new lover.
I sympathized with Brent in his dilemma. He sincerely did not want to hurt his wife or his children, but at the same time, he felt he deserved a life of happiness. I told him the dismal statistics on second marriages. He was surprised to hear that but was certain that he would beat the odds. I told him about the research on the effects of divorce on children, but he was convinced that he would continue to be a good father to his children and that they would get over the trauma of the divorce. I talked to Brent about the issues in this book and explained the difference between the experience of falling in love and the deep emotional need to feel loved. I explained the five love languages and challenged him to give his marriage another chance. All the while, I knew that my intellectual and reasoned approach to marriage compared to the emotional high that he was experiencing was like pitting a BB gun against an automatic weapon. He expressed appreciation for my concern and asked that I do everything possible to help Becky. But he declared that he saw no hope for the marriage.
One month later, I received a call from Brent. He indicated that he would like to talk with me again. This time when he entered my office he was noticeably disturbed. He was not the calm, cool man I had seen before. His lover had begun to come down from the emotional high, and she was observing things in Brent that she did not like. She was withdrawing from the relationship, and he was crushed. Tears came to his eyes as he told me how much she meant to him and how unbearable it was to experience her rejection.
I listened for an hour before Brent ever asked for my advice. I told him how sympathetic I was to his pain and indicated that what he was experiencing was the natural emotional grief from a loss, and that the grief would not go away overnight. I explained, however, that the experience was inevitable. I reminded him of the temporary nature of the in-love experience, that sooner or later, we always come down from the high to the real world. Some fall out of love before they get married; others, after they get married. He agreed that it was better now than later.
After a while, I suggested that perhaps the crisis was a good time for him and his wife to get some marriage counseling. I reminded him that true, long-lasting emotional love is a choice and that emotional love could be reborn in his marriage if he and his wife learned to love each other in the right love languages. He agreed to marriage counseling; and nine months later, Brent and Becky left my office with a reborn marriage. When I saw Brent three years later, he told me what a wonderful marriage he had and thanked me for helping him at a crucial time in his life. He told me that the grief over losing the other lover had been gone for more than two years. He smiled and said, “My tank has never been so full, and Becky is the happiest woman you are ever going to meet.”
Almost never do two people fall in love on the same day, and almost never do they fall out of love on the same day.
Fortunately Brent was the benefactor of w
hat I call the disequilibrium of the in-love experience. That is, almost never do two people fall in love on the same day, and almost never do they fall out of love on the same day. You don’t have to be a social scientist to discover that truth. Just listen to country and western songs. Brent’s lover happened to have fallen out of love at an opportune time.
Actions and Emotions
In the nine months that I counseled Brent and Becky, we worked through numerous conflicts that they had never resolved before. But the key to the rebirth of their marriage was discovering each other’s primary love language and choosing to speak it frequently.
“What if the love language of your spouse is something that doesn’t come naturally for you?” I am often asked this question at my marriage seminars, and my answer is, “So?”
My wife’s love language is acts of service. One of the things I do for her regularly as an act of love is to vacuum the floors. Do you think that vacuuming floors comes naturally for me? My mother used to make me vacuum. All through junior high and high school, I couldn’t go play ball on Saturday until I finished vacuuming the entire house. In those days, I said to myself, “When I get out of here, one thing I am not going to do: I am not going to vacuum houses. I’ll get myself a wife to do that.”
But I vacuum our house now, and I vacuum it regularly. And there is only one reason I vacuum our house. Love. You couldn’t pay me enough to vacuum a house, but I do it for love. You see, when an action doesn’t come naturally to you, it is a greater expression of love. My wife knows that when I vacuum the house, it’s nothing but 100 percent pure, unadulterated love, and I get credit for the whole thing!
Someone says, “But, Dr. Chapman, that’s different. I know that my spouse’s love language is physical touch, and I am not a toucher. I never saw my mother and father hug each other. They never hugged me. I am just not a toucher. What am I going to do?”
Do you have two hands? Can you put them together? Now, imagine that you have your spouse in the middle and pull him/her toward you. I’ll bet that if you hug your spouse three thousand times, it will begin to feel more comfortable. But ultimately, comfort is not the issue. We are talking about love, and love is something you do for someone else, not something you do for yourself. Most of us do many things each day that do not come “naturally” for us. For some of us, that is getting out of bed in the morning. We go against our feelings and get out of bed. Why? Because we believe there is something worthwhile to do that day. And normally, before the day is over, we feel good about having gotten up. Our actions precede our emotions.
Love is something you do for someone else, not something you do for yourself.
The same is true with love. We discover the primary love language of our spouse, and we choose to speak it whether or not it is natural for us. We are not claiming to have warm, excited feelings. We are simply choosing to do it for his or her benefit. We want to meet our spouse’s emotional need, and we reach out to speak his love language. In so doing, his emotional love tank is filled and chances are he will reciprocate and speak our language. When he does, our emotions return, and our love tank begins to fill.
Love is a choice. And either partner can start the process today.
Your Turn
A key thought here is the idea of speaking our mate’s love language whether or not it is natural for us. Why do you think this is so fundamental to a healthy marriage?
THE 5 LOVE LANGUAGES
Words of Affirmation
Quality Time
Receiving Gifts
Acts of Service
Physical Touch
chapter 11
Love Makes the
Difference
Love is not our only emotional need. Psychologists have observed that among our basic needs are the need for security, self-worth, and significance. Love, however, interfaces with all of those.
If I feel loved by my spouse, I can relax, knowing that my lover will do me no ill. I feel secure in her presence. I may face many uncertainties in my vocation. I may have enemies in other areas of my life, but with my spouse I feel secure.
My sense of self-worth is fed by the fact that my spouse loves me. After all, if she loves me, I must be worth loving. My parents may have given me negative or mixed messages about my worth, but my spouse knows me as an adult and loves me. Her love builds my self-esteem.
The need for significance is the emotional force behind much of our behavior. Life is driven by the desire for success. We want our lives to count for something. We have our own idea of what it means to be significant, and we work hard to reach our goals. Feeling loved by a wife or husband enhances our sense of significance. We reason, If someone loves me, I must have significance.
I am significant because I stand at the apex of the created order. I have the ability to think in abstract terms, communicate my thoughts via words, and make decisions. By means of printed or recorded words, I can benefit from the thoughts of those who have preceded me. I can profit from others’ experience, though they lived in a different age and culture. I experience the death of family and friends and sense that there is existence beyond the material. I discover that, in all cultures, people believe in a spiritual world. My heart tells me it is true even when my mind, trained in scientific observation, raises critical questions.
I may not feel significant until someone expresses love to me.
I am significant. Life has meaning. There is a higher purpose. I want to believe it, but I may not feel significant until someone expresses love to me. When my spouse lovingly invests time, energy, and effort in me, I believe that I am significant. Without love, I may spend a lifetime in search of significance, self-worth, and security. When I experience love, it influences all of those needs positively. I am now freed to develop my potential. I am more secure in my self-worth and can now turn my efforts outward instead of being obsessed with my own needs. True love always liberates.
In the context of marriage, if we do not feel loved, our differences are magnified. We come to view each other as a threat to our happiness. We fight for self-worth and significance, and marriage becomes a battlefield rather than a haven.
Love is not the answer to everything, but it creates a climate of security in which we can seek answers to those things that bother us. In the security of love, a couple can discuss differences without condemnation. Conflicts can be resolved. Two people who are different can learn to live together in harmony. We discover how to bring out the best in each other. Those are the rewards of love.
“We’re Like Roommates”
The decision to love your spouse holds tremendous potential. Learning their primary love language makes that potential a reality. At least it did for John and Susan.
They had traveled for three hours to get to my office. It was obvious that John did not want to be there. Susan had twisted his arm by threats of leaving him. (I do not suggest this approach, but people do not always know my suggestions before they come to see me.) They had been married for more than thirty years and had never gone to counseling before.
Susan began the conversation. “Dr. Chapman, I want you to know two things up front. First of all, we don’t have any money problems. I was reading in a magazine that money is the biggest problem in marriage. That’s not true for us. We both have worked through the years, the house is paid for, the cars are paid for. We don’t have any money problems. Second, I want you to know that we don’t argue. I hear my friends talking about the arguments they have all the time. We have never argued. I can’t remember the last time we ever had an argument. Both of us agree that arguing is fruitless, so we don’t argue.”
As a counselor, I appreciated Susan’s clearing the path. I knew that she was going to get right to the point.
She continued, “The problem is that I just don’t feel any love coming from my husband. Life is a routine for us. We get up in the morning and go off to work. In the afternoon, he does his thing and I do my thing. We generally have dinner together, but we don�
��t talk. He watches TV while we eat. After dinner, he putters in the basement and then sleeps in front of the TV until I tell him it’s time to go to bed. That’s our schedule five days a week. On Saturday, he plays golf in the morning, works in the yard in the afternoon, and we go out to dinner with another couple on Saturday night. He talks to them, but when we get into the car to go home, the conversation is over. On Sunday morning, we go to church. And so on.
“We’re like two roommates living in the same house. There is nothing going on between us. I don’t feel any love coming from him. There’s no warmth, there’s no emotion. It’s empty, it’s dead. I don’t think I can go on much longer like this.”
By that time, Susan was crying. I handed her a tissue and looked at John. His first comment was, “I don’t understand her.” After a brief pause, he continued, “I have done everything I know to show her that I love her, especially the last two or three years since she’s been complaining about it so much. Nothing seems to help. No matter what I do, she continues to complain that she doesn’t feel loved. I don’t know what else to do.”
I could tell that John was frustrated and exasperated. I inquired, “What have you been doing to show your love for Susan?”
“Well, for one thing,” he said, “I get home from work before she does, so I get dinner started every night. In fact, if you want to know the truth, I have dinner almost ready when she gets home four nights a week. The other night, we go out to eat. I do all the vacuuming because her back is bad. I do all the yard work because she is allergic to pollen. I fold the clothes when they come out of the dryer.”