Shortly after I got home from Chile nine months ago, some friends introduced me to the concept of the five love languages: physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time, service, and gift-giving (those are mine in order, by the way). Now, I don't know if it was a new concept, by which I mean that it had come out in the two years I was gone, or if I had simply never heard of it before, but it revolutionized the way I looked at relationships. It completely changed the way I treated people. I knew easily enough how I wanted to be treated, but, like I say in my post about the Golden Rule (http://the-angel-in-the-marble.blogspot.com/2015/11/love-greater-than-diamonds_15.html), one step higher is to treat them the way they want to be treated. And now I had an easy measuring system.
That's not to say that I immediately had stellar success with the lady folk, but my patience and understanding increased manifold. I suddenly recognized that when a girl didn't want to hold hands as often as I did, it didn't necessarily mean she didn't like me, and the phrase "I don't care what we do as long as we do it together" took on an entirely new significance. Learning about love languages was the best thing that happened to my love life.
Luckily for me, I'm engaged to the most amazing human being on earth, Konrie. I won't bore you a cheesy declaration of love—I can do that to her face. But even luckilier (not a word) for me, we speak the same love languages in the same order, so we're always on the same page in giving and receiving affection. It's great. I know that that's not the case for everyone, nor does it need to be, nor should it be all the time. Differences serve to help people recognize their need for one another, not tear them apart. Differences keep us humble and remind us that our way and the highway are not the only ways. And despite having identical love languages, and despite our bilinguility (not a word) of English and Spanish, my fiancée and I still speak another language completely differently: texting.
As you can imagine, my texting language is pretty much the same as the way I write on here. Okay, so it's identical. I don't compartmentalize my writing. I just speak through my fingers. Konrie, however, goes for the classic, faster option. She abbreviates. She says, "U" instead of "You," "Ur" instead of both "You're" and "Your," and sometimes she types words without vowels so the message is more concise. Mind you, there's nothing wrong with this. It works perfectly. But it's not the way I speak, and it has taken some getting used to. Knowing this, Konrie even added shortcuts to her keyboard so that "U" turns into "You," etc. I'm not sure now if she's just typing the condensed, automatically expanding versions or if I've corrupted her. Probably the former.
I know that she loves me. I know that her time-saving techniques reflect no ill-will or desire to be done with me as quickly as possible. It doesn't mean that she doesn't care to invest enough time in me to type the message out "properly," as I see it. I mean, really, the fact that she would create the shortcuts at all should tell me how much she values my happiness. I'm very grateful to her.
But to be completely honest, it was tough in the beginning. I used to say that one of the requirements for my future wife was that she know the difference between "your" and "you're." That requirement lasted even after I got rid of the demand that she be able to sing well (Konrie does, by the way). Poor text speech has been a turnoff for me for years, as shallow as that may seem. But it was a big deal to me, and I had to work hard to overcome that mental block. But I did, and now I understand that I've been overthinking the whole thing.
I think all of us have things like that—either discrepancies in love languages or unrealistic expectations for our loved ones. It's an inescapable element of human nature to idealize the world in your own favor, but (maybe unfortunately) we're not the only people on this planet, me, myself, and I. We all have to learn to live with each other and communicate. I would say that we have to learn to make do with what we have, but it's not quite like that, either. We're supposed to prosper, to develop, to progress. We won't succeed in life without relationships (romantic or otherwise), and we'll never have relationships unless we learn about, with, and from one another.
So whatever language you speak, however you say it, "Yo te amo," "Eu te amo," "Je t'aime," "Ich liebe dich," a hug, a plate of cookies, or an evening out, let's all learn to understand that we're all saying the same thing: "I luv u."
I've posted this video before, but I still love it. It's so cute!!!
Well said! We luv, luv, luv u!
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