What happens to love after the wedding? (from chapter 1)
Couples can attend a communication
workshop, hear wonderful ideas on how to enhance communication, return
home, and find themselves totally unable to implement the communication
patterns demonstrated.
Because we give and receive love
differently, keeping love alive in our marriages is hard work. If
we don’t understand how our spouse receives love, our marriages may dry
up and we won’t understand why. We need to understand each others
primary way of receiving love.
One of the biggest things I have
struggled with being married has been expressing love in a way that my
wife understands. At the start even though I knew that I loved
her, and I felt like I was demonstrating this, my expressions of love
were not all getting through to her. And the same was true of her
ways of expressing her love to me.
The first week in our class we had the couples each write down one
thing that their spouse has done for them that made them feel
loved. After they wrote it down, we had them trade with their
spouse and read what the other had written. Many of them were
surprised at what their spouse had chosen as the single action
that had most made them feel loved. This makes sense in light of
the what Dr. Chapman says regarding how in most marriages each spouse
understands / receives / interprets expressions of love in a different
way than their spouse.