Book Summary Preview : The Five Love Languages

On Loving and Being In-Love

The dating phase puts the couple in a rather hazy state of being in-love, that almost magical feeling of being with someone whose, in the words of Gary Chapman, physical characteristics and personality traits create enough shock to trigger your love alert system. As you spend time with each other, you desire to know the person more, and quite surprisingly (or gallingly for that matter), everything you see is positive. In your eyes, he/she is the paragon of fineness, and with this person you anticipate countless possibilities, all of them equally optimistic. There is no doubt that you are caught up in inflated euphoria and delusion; you have never been this much happy and never been this much vibrant, and you feel like you will never be your old self again.

As romance progresses, you become more emotionally obsessed with each other. You stay up until the wee hours of the night just thinking about how it would be like to have him/her close. You wake up in the morning and get an intense rush with the first thought of that person. When you hold hands, it is as if yours was made to fit his/hers perfectly, and when you are both locked in an embrace you never want to let go. A minute or two of not being together is almost like a year of waiting. You started watching basketball because it was his favorite pastime. You, on the other hand, suddenly got into classical music and ballet shows because it was what exhilarated her. There is so much fun, so much fit, so much contentment.

Most couples enter marriage through this so-called in-love experience and were made to believe that it will last because, “We were in-love.” If you are one of these couples, you might harbor the conviction that everything can be conquered and nothing can ever go wrong. This may prove true, perhaps throughout the honeymoon stage or the first few months of married life, where the two of you still have either that “climactic hang-over” or that fairy tale-like reverie you never want to wake up from. Unfortunately, the belief that the in-love experience in dating will be carried on exactly the same in marriage is utterly erroneous. More likely than not, couples contend with the acrid opposite.

Citing Dr. Dorothy Tennov, a psychologist, Gary Chapman indicated that the average life span of a romantic obsession is two years. If it is a secretive affair, it may last a little longer. Eventually, however, we all descend from the clouds and plant our feet on earth again. This is the murky reality that many couples do not know of, if not totally refute. In your rather delusional state of mind, you fail to recognize the other person’s personality or attitudinal flaws. Inside the marriage, and in trying to sustain a semblance of marital bliss, you overlooked his propensity for verbal abuse or her penchant for vanity. You have not anticipated that he could be withdrawn and uncaring, or that she could be high-strung and suicidal.

What you’ve both dreamed of throughout the in-love phase does not entirely replicate in the real world of marriage. At this point, intimate lovers turn into the worst enemies and since then started repudiating married life. In addition, the rapture during the in-love phase has given both of you the illusion that you have achieved a certain level in your relationship that qualifies marriage. Little did you know that the in-love experience is not what is vital for a marriage to work but “real love.”

Dr. Dorothy Tennov and psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, have concluded that the in-love experience is not “real love” for three reasons:

• Falling in-love is not an act of the will or a conscious choice. Often, we fall in love at inopportune times and with unlikely people;

• Falling in-love is not real love because it is effortless. What we do in the in-love state requires little discipline or conscious effort. The instinctual nature of the in-love experience pushes us to do outlandish and unnatural things for each other;

• The one who is in-love is not genuinely interested in fostering the personal growth of the other person. Our purpose when we fall in-love is to terminate our loneliness and perhaps ensure this result through marriage.

Because the aforesaid reasons paint a rather sinister picture of being in-love, does this mean that you’d rather not go through this episode? Does this portend only a miserable life with your spouse? Gary Chapman argues that this should not necessarily be an austere case. His advice is to recognize the in-love experience as an ephemeral stage, what he dubs as “a temporary emotional high,” after which you are called to pursue “real love,” one that goes beyond emotional obsession, a love that is spurred by reason, act of will, and discipline, and recognizes the need for the other person’s growth.

With “real love,” you love because you see in the person something worth loving. That recognition alone requires heartfelt effort, to understand, to accept, to appreciate, and to be continually moved by the mystery of finding out more about the other person. In Gary Chapman’s words, “Real love is the choice to expend energy in a desire to benefit the other person, knowing that if his or her life is enriched by your effort, you too will find a sense of satisfaction—the satisfaction of having genuinely loved another.”This means that real love is selfless, even when the in-love experience has run its course.

In the absence of the in-love feelings, you become more mindful of the shortcomings of your spouse. Yet if in such absence, you choose to be kind, understanding and generous, then that is real love. That kind of love begins with an attitude—a way of thinking. The one who chooses to love after the in-love obsession had died out will (always) find appropriate ways to express that decision. But how could that be? How can you meet the emotional needs of your spouse and at the same feel loved yourself? How can your “love tanks” be constantly filled to the brim?

Beyond Complacency: Intersubjective Meanings in Marriage

As married couples, your most important task is to avert “love expiry”—to keep the emotional love tank full and make your spouse feel incessantly secure in your love. Most couples find themselves at a sort of stalemate; they seem to be two different people devoid of any intimate connection whatsoever. There are those whose marriage climate had been so laid-back, almost to the point of insensibility. Couples tend to do or say things “on the surface,” without much thought of the deeper yearnings of their spouse that they used to easily respond to when they were still dating.

Sadly after marriage, the shooting stars and the magic of it all seemed to just fade away. The couples cease to think love, talk love, and act love in the same “wavelength” as before and oftentimes, this leads to fights whose consequences are irreparable. This is so, because couples have different “love languages” that need to be understood and met in order for the marriage to work. It is so much like you speaking Chinese as your primary language, and your spouse, Greek. No matter how hard you try, even if you learn quite a portion of the other language, one way or another, there would be junctures when intersubjective meanings—what you have taken to mean for one thing is the same as what your spouse have construed or interpreted—cannot simple materialize.

With that, Gary Chapman brings to the fore, the 5 Love Languages in order to help resuscitate a married life on its last legs. Though not, in itself, a panacea, Gary Chapman’s work proffers practical steps that would aid married couples in finding the “real love” they thought they already lost and in living happily ever after.