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How We Got the Love Languages Wrong

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You’d be hard-pressed to find a discussion on social media about Christian relationships that doesn’t include a mention of the book The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. Dr. Chapman’s ideas about the ways that couples give and receive love really seemed to revolutionize the Christian marriage counseling world. He hit on something true: we all feel and hear love in different ways.

But, I’ve noticed that, in typical wretched sinner fashion, we have taken this knowledge and used it to grow selfish and dissatisfied in otherwise peaceful marriages. Instead of learning what our spouse’s love language is and then trying with all our might to express love in the ways that we know he will feel the most cared-for, we spend time dwelling on all of the ways that he isn’t meeting our needs. We lament and get on Facebook threads and we decry an otherwise wonderful, godly, loving man because he isn’t good at expressing love in the one way that we have decided we need to receive it.

In truth, we have misused the great information that The Five Love Languages gave us. Instead of using the book as a tool to better understand our husband or wife, we have used it as a weapon to demand more and better and to be utterly dissatisfied with all of the expressions of love that are right in front of us.

As a concept, this book was meant to help us understand our spouse more. It’s meant to help us be better comminucators, more selfless, more focused on the needs of the one who pledged to give an entire life to us. But, we have taken this idea and twisted it into a way to despise the kind and generous and loving things that our husband or wife is doing day after day, all because they don’t fit into a very small mold of what we have convinced ourselves we need. And then we become obsessed with what we feel is lacking instead of grateful for what is really there.

The Five Love Languages can be a great way for us to learn about our spouse. It can be a wonderful tool in marriage. But, like all good things, when we allow our sinful and selfish tendencies to pervert it, the Love Languages can become a detriment to an otherwise happy and healthy marriage. The Bible teaches us that love is not envious, proud, or self-seeking. It isn’t easily angered and keeps no record of wrongs. The last thing we should be doing is taking Dr. Chapman’s helpful concept and turning it into an excuse to sin against our spouse. Maybe what we should do instead is forget we ever learned what our own love language is and focus instead on how we can “speak” to our spouse in a way that makes him or her feel absolutely loved. And then we should “listen” to all of the ways that our spouse is speaking to us, refusing to reject acts of love just because they don’t fit into a category that is found nowhere in Scripture. We are wasting so much time trying to demand love in the way that we think we deserve it. If we will only open our hearts and minds and arms to the love that is already there, contentment and peace will follow.

Marriage as a Ministry

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Chad and I walked the sweet couple to the door, and we all chattered over each other as we said our goodbyes and hugged and laughed. It was the end of a marriage counseling session. The four of us had been sitting in our living room, huddled together on couches that had been used as gymnastics equipment by our seven year old daughter earlier that afternoon. We talked about important things, about Jesus things, about the joys and hardships that come with marriage and life, and about how through it all the Lord sustains and He gives grace and He offers truth that runs counter to all the world’s advice.

We shut the door and got our children in bed, and then Chad and I settled down for an evening together, both of us still thinking about the joy that comes with mentoring young couples in their very first days as husband and wife. Still, I was surprised when he turned to me and said, simply, “I never feel more called to ministry than when we’re sitting in our living room with someone on our couch like that.”  Here is a man who stands behind a pulpit and preaches God’s word every Sunday, who leads prayer meetings and ministers in hospitals, nursing homes, and funeral homes. A man who sits across from people who need financial help almost every day, who listens and counsels and carries people’s secrets around with him like Jacob Marley’s ponderous chains. This is a man whose entire life is given for Christ and for serving others. Yet, in this moment he revealed something precious to me: he feels most secure in his calling when we are serving together.

We were newlyweds ourselves when we first figured out that serving side by side is one of the greatest blessings of marriage. We dove directly into a local church where we were loved and mentored and allowed to use our gifts to glorify God. We would talk for hours about the best ways to do church, about who God is and what He might have in store for us, all of this years before He ever called us to take on a full-time ministry position. We were just a young couple with jobs and bills and worries and marriage struggles who happened to love our church and enjoy serving with our church family. We soon realized that this life of shared ministry would be a foundation that our marriage could stand on. It was fun. It was challenging. And it forced us to depend on the Lord. So, through several career changes and moves and births and miscarriages and all of the regular heartaches and hilarities of life, two constants were a reliance on Jesus and a vision for being a couple who served Him together.

Turns out that twenty years later, we still feel most at home in ministry when we’re working side by side. There is a spiritual intimacy that comes with viewing your relationship itself as a vehicle for blessing the church. Through the many phases and stages of life, our shared understanding that we are meant to serve together has kept us from getting too bogged down in that marriage and family self-obsession that is so easy to fall into. We have never served perfectly. We have never perfected marriage or ministry or juggling life in all of its craziness. But one thing I can say with assurance: our marriage has made life so much more interesting and fun and spiritually fulfilling not because we are madly in love (although we are) and not because we have it all together (because we don’t), but because we have simply had a great time serving the Lord together. And over and over and over again, He has blessed the whole imperfect ball of wax.

Someday soon we will have another young couple sitting expectantly on our worn couch, and we may or may not have much wisdom to offer them. But as I sit next to the man who has helped me love the Lord more today than I did on the day we married, I will be able to advise those newlyweds with confidence: view your marriage as a ministry. And just wait and see what God will do.

Check-up Questions for a Marriage Milestone

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When I was younger I tried to imagine what it would be like to be married for twenty years. I blinked, and then it was here. Twenty years of laughing, arguing, being annoyed, being annoying, winking across rooms, learning, growing, and changing, always changing. When milestones approach, we all tend to get a little introspective. We assess what our life has become. We take time to think about how we feel as we look around at the way things have turned out. It’s natural and good to examine our lives, but the trouble is that we tend to do this alone, and we fail to communicate with our spouse about this assessment. Our hearts get full and they get antsy and they get sad and they get worried, but we are generally terrible at expressing all of this to our spouse.

A marriage milestone is the perfect time to sit down together to think and talk through where our marriage has come from, what it is, and what we hope it will become. It’s a way to check in with each other and really try to understand how each of us sees and understands the life that we are living. Too often we go through life just guessing what our spouse is thinking. Too often we assume that no news is good news, that as long as nothing of too much significance is being brought up by our spouse, then everything must be good. But, we don’t want just an okay marriage. As Christians we long for a marriage that breathes life wherever it goes, that spreads encouragement and faith and is a clear picture of the gospel. We long for a relationship that brings both of us closer to Christ and helps us to know and understand His love more.  And we want a marriage that’s fun, that makes life better, not worse. We want to be friends, and we want to keep learning about each other.

With that in mind, here are some questions for couples to use as a starting point for some state-of-the-marriage discussions.

  1. What are two or three of your favorite memories of our life together? Are we still making memories like that?
  2. How has your understanding of God’s purpose for our marriage developed over the years?
  3. What is one thing about our marriage that is life-giving for you? What about for others?
  4. How is our marriage different from your parents’ marriage? How is it the same?
  5. What words would you use to describe this season of our marriage?
  6. How have you seen yourself grow as a Christ-follower, spouse, parent since we married?
  7. How have you seen me grow as a Christ-follower, spouse, parent since we married?
  8. Where do you see the Holy Spirit working in each of us now?
  9. In what ways do you feel we are especially strong as a couple?
  10. What is one area of our marriage that you would like to see grow and develop more?
  11. What is one small thing that I could do each day that would help you or show you love?
  12. Do you feel like you can talk to me about anything? If not, how can I make communication easier?
  13. What are you looking forward to as you consider our future?
  14. How does our life look different than what you were expecting when we married?
  15. How can I encourage you in your battle against sin and in your relationship with Christ?

I pray that these ideas will help you and your spouse evaluate, reminisce, and remember what God has done in your life. Talking to one another is key to building a lasting, fulfilling, God-honoring marriage. It isn’t always easy to communicate, but you will reap so many rewards by asking thoughtful questions and listening for your spouse’s heart in the answers. Allow your next milestone to cause you to bend your heads together, considering as one where you are and where you’re going. May God bless your efforts.

A Tale of Two Bathroom Drawers

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The first sign that Chad and I were basically incompatible came in the form of closets. We had been married for a couple of months, and I felt that he was obsessive about his closet. He cleaned it out once a week or so, taking out excess hangers, making sure that all of the clothing was turned in the proper direction and that it was arranged by season and type. His shoes were perfectly lined up on the floor. The top of his closet was practically empty, but what was there was neatly concealed in perfectly stacked boxes. It was as if his closet was one area of his life where he had complete control, and he maintained that control with all precision and care.

My closet, on the other hand, was a haphazard mish-mash of half-hung clothes, empty hangers, shoes thrown carelessly on the floor, the remains of the twelve outfits that I had tried on earlier in the day flung here and there. The top of my closet was a pile of stuff I didn’t know what to do with, and the bottom of it was a confused mess of scarves, belts, shoes, tops, skirts, jeans, and pjs. And nothing about it stressed me out. Nothing about it worried me in the least or made me feel like I was a slob or made me worry about the state of my brain. I had always been a messy, creative person. To me, piles were just temporary things that you worked around while the really good, creative stuff was happening: the writing and the thinking and the singing and the designing.

I learned pretty quickly that we were going to get on each other’s nerves. I felt like he was truly ridiculous for being so strict about his closet. He felt like I was truly disturbed to be okay with a closet that looked like it had been hit by a clothing tsunami. Our competing styles of living spilled into the rest of our house, and most of the time I either felt like my creative endeavors were being squashed by endless housekeeping or he felt like his brilliant mind was being cluttered by unregulated piles. It didn’t make for a super fun living situation. We would sometimes leave the house and go for a walk (because we had no money to do anything more interesting), just so that we could each escape the pressures of sharing a space with a person who had such different ideas of how things should be done.

That was twenty years ago. Through two decades of sharing a house, we have both changed in certain ways. We both saw the need to bend in the direction of the other. I started liking the way it felt when things were organized and in their place. He started to lighten up about everything being perfectly arranged at all times. We learned that the happiest spot is somewhere in between wildly undisciplined and unreasonably staunch. These days we spend most of our time at home working together to try to keep our home neat, not perfect. Livable, not a museum. Comfortable. Welcoming. A nice place to come home to. Most days things are messier than we’d like. Three children tend to do that to a place. Most days we comment about how we should do this or that. But we focus much more on really living together, not just keeping house together, and I think that may have been what was missing all those years ago as we tried to stubbornly stick to our own way of managing life.

Last night as I dug through my bathroom drawer, I couldn’t find the toothpaste. I opened Chad’s drawer and I was struck by how we are both still who we are. Who God made us to be. His drawer is as beautiful as a bathroom drawer can be, and my drawer is a mess that has to be dug through on a nightly basis. It made me laugh, standing there, twenty years into life with this man that I know so well. I laughed because our bathroom drawers are evidence that we have both compromised in order to live at peace with the one we love. We have both given more than we had to and we have both accepted more than we thought we could so that our love can thrive here, not just in our home, but in our life together.

Somehow looking into that oddly perfect bathroom drawer made me love him just a little more, because it reminded me that love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. I see all of that and more, in one little bathroom drawer. And I’m grateful.

Don’t Stop Discovering Your Spouse

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Chad and I talk a lot. After twenty-four years of being friends, and twenty of those years living under the same roof,  you would think that we know just about everything about each other. You might assume that we’ve heard every story and can easily predict each other’s reactions to different situations. But, that’s not true. We are still discovering things about each other. He still surprises me regularly with an opinion or idea. I still have plenty of childhood stories in my memory that he has never heard. One of the most fun things about talking to your husband or wife is that there is always the chance that you will go a little bit deeper in understanding and knowing each other. There are all kinds of fascinating things going on in your spouse’s mind that you will never uncover unless you communicate.

Some couples have a hard time talking to each other. It’s understandable. It can be awkward and even disappointing or upsetting at times to try to talk with your spouse. Yet, sticking with small talk or, worse, silence, can be extremely damaging to your relationship. Even introverts need and crave human connection, and there is no one you should be seeking to know more than you seek to know your husband or wife.

God has given us marriage as a gift. What are we doing with it? Are we just getting through the days, working side by side but not connecting with each other in intimate ways? Are we neglecting each other in favor of other pursuits, even good things? One cure for a lack of connection is real communication. But, where do we start?

The other day Chad and I were at lunch and he mentioned that it would be fun to have some questions to ask each other. We searched around on the internet there in our booth and found a few websites that had conversation starters. We chose a few questions we found interesting, and it was really fun to see what kind of answers we could come up with. Oddly enough, a few days later I found an email in my inbox from Katie at Personal Creations, and she had created free printable questions for couples that she wanted to share with my readers! Is the internet spying on me? (Probably.)

Regardless, I really like these questions. Katie has even divided them into categories so that you can narrow down the topics that you might want to talk about at any given time. I think this is the first time I’ve ever gotten to offer free printables on my blog, and I’m pumped. Katie even includes some blank cards. I think I will use those to write some questions about spiritual things. You can print these cute cards out or just download them to your phone and pull them up during dinner one night. There are all kinds of ways you can use these questions to discover new things about your spouse and liven up the conversation when you’re driving or just hanging out together.

Just click the button above to download and/or print your questions. Huge thanks to Katie and Personal Creations for reaching out to me with this fun freebie. I would love to hear how you plan to use these questions to keep discovering your spouse. Have fun!

My Husband, My Friend, My Brother

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Today is Chad’s 44th birthday. Sometimes it takes my breath away, how quickly that our life is flying past. I remember exactly how I felt about life back in 1995 when I first laid eyes on him. He was young and unsure and I was naive and cautious. We struck up an unlikely friendship that puzzled lots of people, and here we are, a couple of decades later, still friends.

There are times when I get sad, thinking about the fact that we only have one lifetime to live as husband and wife. Our life isn’t perfect, because we aren’t perfect. There is plenty of un-fun stuff to deal with when you’re all grown up, but we are happy, truly happy, to be side by side through the good and the bad of the human existence.

After twenty years I’m beginning to learn that one key to Christian marriage is realizing that your husband, your closest friend, is also your brother in Christ. He is yours to uphold and safeguard. To marvel at as He grows in faith. To encourage, to bring honor to, to love. And at the end of this marriage, when one us of slips from this life to the next, we can take comfort in knowing that he is my brother and I am his sister, both heirs of the King who brought us together in the first place. We will have eternity.

I once heard John Piper say that whatever the marriage relationship is on earth, it will be something infinitely better in Heaven. Chad may one day cease to be my husband, but he will never cease to be my brother. It’s one of the great gifts of Christian marriage–knowing that we will forever worship our Savior, side by side. We will see each other as we were always meant to be. And we will know that, through this too-short life, we helped each other prepare for the day we would stand before the Lord.

What an undeserved blessing. Happy birthday to my husband, my friend, my brother.

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