Though the expression of our language of love is peculiar to each couple, the process by which we discover and speak each other's languages is universal. We're not born knowing a language of love. We learn it first from our parents, usually...through the touches and gestures they use when fulfilling our needs and their parental duties. As we grow these become ritualized: a particular way of baking cookies or celebrating Christmas or discussing important events which we equate with comfort and goodness and home.
Great fun ensues when we move out of our homes and embark on our lives and their attendant relationships, including and especially marriage. Into marriage you carry with you a bundle of assumptions about love and how to communicate it, learned from your earlier days and relationships. You quickly find out that your spouse carries their own bundle and that the two bundles aren't the same! Many married couples who just committed themselves to a life of eternal bliss find themselves arguing with each other with surprising vehemence about the importance of creamy peanut butter versus crunchy not long after the ink has dried on their certificate. How in the world could anyone like Extra-Crunchy Jif when any fool knows that Creamy Skippy really means home and love and safety? What ever possessed me to marry such a stubborn, ignorant, Crunchy guy?
Just as much fun are the subtle moments wherein each partner feels something lacking. She doesn't make meatloaf quite like mom did. He doesn't remember to thank her for the meal like her dad did with her mom. He hasn't brought flowers in six months. She doesn't appreciate how hard he works. Would it kill him to remember the garbage without being told? Would it kill her to change out of those sweats every once in a while?
The problem with these scenarios lies not in the differences between two people, nor in the divisions between them. Those are going to happen with any two people in a sustained relationship. How many differences did you have with your siblings or parents, for instance? And all of you had the benefit of growing up in the same household and family culture! Small wonder you have differences with someone from outside that culture.
No, the problem comes when each party forgets that their language of love is just that...a language. It's relational, a means of communication, a way to unite people and give them common purpose. When we have these struggles in our relationships it's usually because both sides are viewing their outlook as absolute. This isn't a way of showing love, this is the way of showing love. ( Or this is love itself, or there is no love without this and why can't that blockhead understand that like a reasonable, normal human being???) Where language unites, absolutes divide. But it doesn't take much stepping back to realize that there's nothing absolute about peanut butter or a flower-bringing schedule or division of household chores.
If we're able to step back--a skill which most married people soon acquire if they're to be successful in their marriage--we realize that there's no universal rule saying that one person's way is right and another's wrong in these matters. We also realize, though, that if we want to have a happy and fulfilled spouse it would behoove us to learn a little bit about their assumptions about love, the way they desire to be loved, and to begin to speak their language every now and again instead of just insisting on our own.
This is the beauty of the language metaphor. It requires all the things that make a relationship strong: setting aside yourself and your claims to being absolutely right, taking time to getting to know another person, taking time to understand their background and culture, showing them that you hear them, communicating your appreciation of them by speaking in the ways they find most familiar and dear whether or not those ways are instinctively your own. What an amazing process! And what an amazing moment when he realizes that taking out the garbage without being reminded isn't just a chore, it's a way of making her feel happy and secure that he cares...a way of saying, "I love you." What an amazing moment when she realizes that taking out the garbage isn't just an absolute "way things should be" but him doing something that isn't in his instinctive nature just to make her feel loved. All of a sudden the trash changes from a Big Fight to a huge affirmation, from something that divides two people to something that brings them together.
This lesson doesn't just apply to married people either. If our focus in the coming year is going to be evangelism we first have to admit that evangelism takes time, patience, listening, understanding cultures and backgrounds--especially religious--other than our own. It requires the same kind of love, effort, and sometimes sacrifice that a good marriage requires. We have to stop thinking of our way of doing church, practicing religion, and defining God as absolutes. We have to understand that all of these things are part of a bigger relationship--first with God, then with each other--and that this relationship has room for more people than just us and those who think like us. This is a big step for most of us, especially when we've learned/been taught that Creamy Peanut Butter is the only Holy Peanut Butter. We might have to get used to a little Crunchy now and then for the sake of our neighbors for whom that is holy and good.
Pray this week, first for the married couples among us and those contemplating or searching for marriage, but also for all of us in all relationships wherein the language of love needs to be spoken and heard more than it is. Pray that we might be willing to not only communicate our own language and needs, but to hear the language and needs of our friends and neighbors especially as those relate to God and faith.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
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