Last week I introduced one of my favorite books for couples; The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. I have loved that book since 2004 and still refer to it so often in my marriage. One of the things that I love about the book, aside from the great advice it offers to couples, is the variety of exercises that you can try to help get you on the right path to loving your spouse in the way he/she wants to be loved. One of the suggestions is for each person to write down on a piece of paper when they feel loved and then put it in a cup. Once the cups are full, you trade cups and pull out each piece of paper to read when the other person felt loved. For example, I would fill up the cup with things like…
”I feel loved when Steve cooks dinner with me and we eat together.”
“I feel loved when Steve wants to go on a walk in the evening time.”
“I felt loved when Steve told me I looked beautiful before I left the house.”
And once our cups were full, Steve would read all the ways I felt loved and I would read all the ways he felt loved. We would hold onto those papers and try to repeat those actions so we were sure to love each other in the right way.
So right now, you are either thinking this is super cheesy or absolutely loving the idea. Steve and I were also hesitant at first. We thought we didn’t need an exercise to help us, but once we realized how simple it was to focus on the positive way of communicating our love needs, it could ONLY be good for us. It greatly reduced the fights that got us nowhere and started with hurtful words such as, “you don’t do (XYZ)…” or “why can’t you be (XYZ)…”. Those words only ever led to an even bigger fight where we would mention annoyances or pains in the past that didn’t need to be brought up again. This exercise is a great way of filling each other up so much with love that you have little to complain about.
When we first started this exercise in our marriage six years ago, our cups were old Coca-Cola mugs. Ha! We kept the same cups forever, but just recently we wanted to make something special for our clients. And, after a little brainstorming with my friend Angela, these love cups made perfect sense! So we bought mason jars, found the perfect ribbon and lace to match my brand, tea-stained a bunch of paper and….
Wah.LA! Our new love cups and our gift to our families and couples :-)
And now that we have kids, we do it with our children too. We set it in a common place for all of us to see and use as often as possible. With Addisyn, we ask her when she feels loved by us and then we fill it out for her. This is our love cup in our kitchen.
The winner to “The Five Love Languages” book is Jade. Congrats, Jade! Please email me your address at stacy@stacyhart.com
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