Change your life
I Just listened to this talk (see below), and I have actually found this to be true. On my own I figured this out a few years ago. My wife and I had slowly drifted apart. I am happy watching sports, going on hikes, being outdoors. She is happy watching TV.
I read the book on love languages and figured that I had better change to try and get our marriage on the right track. It took some time for me to figure out that I was just as much of the problem as I had blamed her for.
It was not easy, I spent time trying to work out what was her love language. I figured if I could speak her love language, then she would be filled with love and start speaking mine back to me. I was wrong.
First off my wife is complicated and it took way to long for me to figure that out as well as her love language is a multiple of things and they change in priority at different times. Good grief. The most disheartening thing I learned was that one of her top love languages was gift giving (or receiving actually).
Gift giving is not in my top 1000 love languages. But now I knew I found a big problem. So I have to change my gift giving story. I found ways to give my wife gifts, without giving her gifts. Strange I know. But this worked for me who didn't feel it necessary to buy something for the love of my life that she may or may not like or want. (did I mention that I am terrible at choosing gifts).
you may ask how does one give a gift without actually giving a gift, that is difficult to answer. It really became simple for me, because my wife seemly is receptive to many different love languages. I used that to my advantage, and I would determine something she needed done, and do it. A gift of Service.
She likes to plan vacations and never actually go on them. I would listen to them and take her up on a few, much more often then in the past.
Words of affirmation, I don't need them very often, but she needs them more then I realized, so when she did something that either took a lot of energy or time. I made sure that I told her how much I appreciated that. I also realized that she does a lot of things that I had come to expect and was not verbally thankful for, so I needed to change that about myself also. Things like planning dinner for the entire week for a family of five takes some effort, that I was apparently oblivious to prior to this time of changing my story.
Quality time was something that I took on early in this process, I started to watch more TV with her and slowed down the sports, which became easier over the years due to the increase in ticket prices. She in turn started to surprise me with tickets to games on fathers day and other times in my life. The funny thing was when she was doing it I did not realize this was her changing her story for me. She was gift giving something she thought I needed (but was trying to quit for her), and it was making me mad internally as I thought you are not helping me love you!!! I can laugh at it now, but I really felt like she was sabotaging my efforts to love her by distracting me with sports.
Which brings us to physical touch. much like my gift giving is not in my wheel house, physical touch is not in hers. She grew up in a family that did not believe in PDA (public displays of affection). she cam along in about 20 years after the marriage of her parents began. So I can imagine that much of the passion had cooled when she was old enough to observer her parents. Where I am the oldest and always saw my mom and dad kissing and hugging, holding hands, all the stuff I apparently need.
We are more deeply in love with eachother then at any point in our lives together.
So give this Ted Talk a watch and hopefully you can find some lost happiness within your life as you move forward.
