When I was fresh out of college I moved overseas to live in Croatia. I was planning to live there a year, but ended up staying for two. (Visit, you’ll see why.) While there, it was part of my responsibility to at least try to learn how to speak Croatian. It was so frightening and awkward and bumpy. I was supposed to practice it with people in my life but I found myself getting too embarrassed and I would clam up and walk away red faced if I made mistakes. After two years there I could squeak out enough sentences to get from my house to another location using public transportation, find public restrooms and order enough food and drink along the way to survive. Even after two years that was about all I could really do because practicing was just so uncomfortable. When I would get around other English speakers I would feel so at home and so at peace. It was a joy to be near them. I was so adverse to the humiliation of practicing that I doubt I wouldn’t have learned much at all if it weren’t for fresh, warm cherry strudel. (I mean ya’ll seriously, its worth the price of a plane ticket, just go and walk into nearly any bakery. They have cherry and apple and oh man…sigh. I went frequently to Pekara Bimita near my house.) I loved cherry strudel so much that my love for it eclipsed my desire to protect myself from humiliation. As a result, some twenty years later, I can still walk into a Croatian bakery and order cherry strudel with passion and flare.
Your spouse or partner might speak and understand a different love language than you do. It happens a lot. You might long for gifts to show you they were thinking about you and they bring you car deodorizers from the gas station. You might pine after long snuggles under warm blankets but your partner has some trauma that makes snuggling hard! You might just want to hear anything your partner loves about you but hear from them, “I dunno, you’re pretty?” Not having a spouse speak your love language is as isolating and frustrating as being in a foreign country speaking a different language. You long to hear them say something to you in your native tongue and feel frustrated that they can’t always understand you.
Beware the traps that say, “I just don’t feel loved if they don’t love me in the right way!” Just like I could learn how to order a strudel and get the message across you too can learn to hear and understand your spouses loving gestures in whatever love language they use with you and you can learn over time to speak to their hearts in ways that sing love to them. You perhaps cannot get to those places without it feeling bumpy, awkward, embarrassing or strange. But let’s get real, what moves us to face the difficulty is just how much we love our spouses (Or cherry strudel, respectively.)
If you’re struggling to communicate with your partner and need help learning their language, reach out to me or a couples therapist in your area.