I see a lot of blog posts about relationships and love float around the walls of my Facebook friends and get shared about, and they are usually pretty good. I also find that they are typically fairly short(ish) and sweet. They get to the point and are fairly organized/direct in their approach. Unfortunately, I don't know how to write that way. If you have read any of my other blog posts you probably know this already, but I tend to take a pretty rambling, roundabout approach before I actually make the point that I want to.
Something else, however, that I've noticed about most of the relationship blog posts that get shared among my friends is that they all focus on marriage and "romantic" relationships. Discussing Dating/Courtship, pointing out the importance of selflessness in marriage, and debunking the idea of souldmates are all perfectly valid topics for discussion, and far be it from me to pick on either the writers of those posts or the people that eagerly re-post them.
What I think is missing from these posts full of Relationship Advice and Insight (often written by young couples a year or two into their marriages or the parents of young married couples) is that they never explore or address the fact that there are a lot of very significant relationships that exist outside of the realm of marriage. It makes sense that you would dedicate a single post to a single concept, but I feel like there needs to be some discussion over how love and relationships exist outside of the context of the whole marriage/dating/courtship realm. As a result, the first three out of four posts in this series are going to be dedicated to talking about our relationships with family and friends, and you'll have to wait until the end of the month to see my thoughts and opinions about the "Dating Game" and soulmates.
In this first installment of the series I want to take a look primarily at how we interact with other people, express our love and feelings, and develop relationships with everyone around us (including the people we may not like or know that much). This post is more of an exploratory one than one aimed at making a particular point, and I am happy to hear the input and thoughts of y'all in the comments.
If you think about it, we are actually participating in some kind of a relationship with everyone we know and come into contact with. We have a relationship with our parents, our siblings, our children, our friends, our coworkers, our employers, our classmates, our professors, our arch enemies, and so on and so forth. Relationships are not confined to a romantic setting; they're not even confined to amiable ones. However, even if our relationships with other people aren't the kind that fill our stomachs with butterflies and our heads with infatuation, we still express our feelings toward each other through some form or another of the five love languages.
There is a website titled "The 5 Love Languages" (http://www.5lovelanguages.com/) that, oddly enough, talks about five different means through which we communicate our love and feelings between ourselves and our acquaintances.Typically people have one or two Love Languages that they are more sensitive to, meaning they express and receive more potent emotion through those one or two languages than through the other three. On the website there is a test you can take that will supposedly inform you what your distribution between the five languages is.
The five languages, according to the website, are A) Words of Affirmation B) Acts of Service C) Receiving/Giving Gifts D) Quality Times and E) Physical Touch.
If you primarily express/receive emotion through Words of Affirmation, then you are pretty sensitive to what other people say, and you put a lot of weight and significance on the value of your owns words. You probably don't make a lot of flippant comments, and you don't take comments from other people very flippantly. If someone compliments you it means a lot, but if someone makes a jibe at you, it is going to really hurt. The long name for this language may be Words of Affirmation but I think you can pretty easily simplify it down to just Words.
However, if your primary love language is Acts of Service , then you put more weight in walking the walk instead of talking the talk. You hold the door open for people you respect and care about, you help them with the groceries, you run their errands, you drop everything to go out and pick them up after their car breaks down, and it means a lot to you when others do the same for you. Acts of Service, or just Acts, is the process of actually doing something for someone else. The thought is nice, but the actual action of performing a helpful act for someone is all the more meaningful.
The interesting thing about both Words and Acts is that regardless of your primary love language, we should really treat everyone around use respectfully through these two particular love languages. We should be willing to be courteous and respectful through our words and actions toward our closest friends, complete strangers, and everyone in between. Words & Acts can be used in more personal and intimate ways, but they are the love languages that I think are most applicable to all relationships we have with anyone.
The third languages, simplified down to Gifts is more personal than Words & Acts. If you primarily show love and affection towards others through the giving of gifts, chances are you become pretty popular around Christmas and Birthdays. Having Gifts as your primary method of showing affection means simply that you like to give people things, and it probably also means that you like to receive things from others as well. Presents and gifts are going to be rather precious and meaningful to you. One of the differences between Gifts and Words & Acts is that giving gifts to people is a much more personal way of showing kindness and love. Unlike Words & Acts, we typically do not go around giving anyone and everyone we meet presents. Usually, presents are reserved only for our friends and family, even if Gifts is not one of our primary modes of amiable communication, and honestly, most strangers would find it pretty weird if we went around handing them gifts.
Even more personal than gift giving however, are the last two love languages, and the two that I think are most directly correlated and connected to our most personal and intimate relationships.
Communicating through Quality Time means communicating beyond small talk and idle chit chat. It can mean sharing a deep conversation about complicated or difficult topics, or it can mean going off on some kind of adventure together (think hunting or camping),but it essentially means that you are developing your relationship through means that go beyond that of a simple acquaintance. It means getting to know each others thoughts, feelings, personalities, personal quirks and hobbies, by doing things together or talking about things that open you up to a deeper, more meaningful friendship.
Quality Time takes both Words of Affirmation and Acts of Service and goes another several steps further.
Lastly, you have Physical Touch, which I believe is the single most personal and intimate of all the love languages (feel free to disagree with me on this). There really aren't many ways to break down Touch, because it is really quite straightforward. It covers hugs, hand holding, arms across the shoulders, pats on the back, kisses, and every other physical interaction that you can think of. It is not a love languages strictly limited to romantic relationships, but is the love language most often associated with them, and I think that is because it is such an intimate one. Actually physically touching someone is a pretty significant act most of the time, and conveys a lot of meaning.
If you think about it, neglect and verbal abuse are both terrible things, but is physical abuse that is most likely to get someone sent to jail. Especially to those of whose most prominent love languages is physical touch, physically abusing a person ranks as one of the most terrible things you can possibly do. Even when you shake hands with someone, that often goes beyond a typical greeting where you merely share a "hello" or "nice to meet you." The people you stop to actually shake hands with are the people with whom you have a slightly more substantial relationship.
So, while it is almost certainly true that everyone has their own primary love language, and that we will all express our feelings and emotions differently on a case by case basis, but I think that you can apply a fairly general overview of the five languages to the development of relationships in general.
In the most basic level of relationships that we have, we interact primarily through Words & Acts. We treat new acquaintances and strangers that we like, or at least have no reason to dislike, with courteous words and friendly acts of service. If we think they do well or have succeed at something we compliment them, and may be willing to lend a helping hand. If, however, we disagree with someone, and don't know them well, we tend to fall back on verbal arguments and we will be less inclined to provide any kind of serviceable act for them. At their worst, hostile strangers are reduced to wild mockery and petty insults (coughYouTubecoughcommentscough). In all relationships at all stages, we use words and acts of service to express our emotions toward someone, but in the case of undeveloped relationships, that is usually where our communication ends.
As relationships progress, however, I think that the other love languages come into play a lot more. The more we get to know and like someone, the more inclined we will to spend quality time with them, to give them gifts, and the less awkward physical interaction with them becomes. In order to really develop a relationship and help it grow though, I think you actually have to spend some quality time together, because relationships of any kind can only grow as a result of two people getting to one another better. Quality time ends up being a cycle where you start getting to know someone better, and if you like them, you start spending more quality time with them and if you like them even more after that, you spend more quality time with them and so on and so forth. If, however, you spend quality time with them and you develop an aversion to them as a result of getting to know them better, you start to avoid spending any further quality time around them.
In many ways, I think that Quality Time serves as the gap between the kinds of relationships that communicate primarily through Words of Affirmation and Acts of Service and those that make more use of Gift Giving and Physical Touch. Once you have spent enough quality time with someone and have gotten to know them well enough, you are more inclined to express your affection and friendliness toward them through the giving of gifts, through physical touch, and through additional quality time.
The one point that I definitely want to draw from all of this though, and the one that is going to come into play a lot more in the next two installments in this series, is that none of the love languages are limited to romantic interactions. It is perfectly possible to express your love and affection for someone through any one of the five without having a relationship with that someone of a romantic boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse relationship.
All five means of affection communication stem naturally from the development of friendships built upon quality time spent together.
I feel like that is a pretty abrupt place to end a post, and I'm not really satisfied with how this one turned out, but I don't want to start spilling over into the subject matter of my next post. Just think of this one as laying the groundwork for the next three, and as an exploratory piece where you have the chance to share your input on the development of friendships and ways of expression love and affection before I start getting highly opinionated.
Stay tuned for the following installment "Part II: The Brotherhood" coming next week in which I will look at the development of loving male comradery/brotherhood and how it has been distorted by modern world culture.
Pax
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