Over the past decade of providing couples and marital counseling, I have found that relationships can be very rewarding but they can also cause stress and anxiety for the individuals in the relationship.  A common theme I’ve encountered is partners feeling confused, unheard, or misunderstood while talking with their significant other.  I often hear questions like, “How can someone I spend so much time with make me feel like they don’t know me?” or “Why do I feel  so alone in my relationship?”.  While there are often multiple factors contributing to these feelings, we are going to look at how a person’s perspective plays into this situation.

It’s important to know things about our significant others: where they are from, what they like to do, what their goals are, and what kind of ice cream they prefer. This information tells us about who our partner is, but this information doesn’t easily translate into understanding their expectations and needs in the context of our relationship. We all have unique childhood experiences (even children raised in the same home) and these experiences shape our understanding of our relationships. Difficulties in romantic relationships can start when people assume the lessons, both intentional and unintentional, they were taught growing up about romantic relationships are the same lessons that their partner was taught. This can cause both parties to assume their partners value the same things and this can turn into an individual believing they have the right way to approach relationship issues.  So, often times you have two individuals with two different perspectives on relationships, and both assume they have the right way. They may have never stopped to consider there is a different way to approach relationships. How do you work around this obstacle?

To begin with, individuals need to acknowledge there are different ways of viewing relationships. Just acknowledging these differences helps our partners feel heard. The next step we can take is to acknowledge that we all receive and give love in different ways. This goes back to our childhood experiences. Our parents and families showed us love in ways that are unique to our family. In his book The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman claims there are five main ways that people in our society experience and show love: receiving gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service (devotion) and physical touch. When we assume that we know our partners love language, we often leave them feeling unheard and misunderstood which in turn leaves us feeling the same way.

Here is a quick story on how this works. I once had a couple in therapy who had been married for a little over a year. The wife expressed that she didn’t feel her husband showed her that he cared about her. The husband quickly defended himself by pointing out all of the romantic things he had done over the past year: buying her flowers (receiving gifts), sending her small symbolic gifts in the mail (receiving gifts), and planning romantic getaways (receiving gifts). The wife looked at him and responded with, “Do you know what would really make me feel like you cared? If you got your butt out of bed on Saturday mornings and cleaned the downstairs bathroom (acts of service).” The husband was surprised. Further discussion showed that he had witnessed his father expressing his love to his wife by giving gifts while the wife had come from a single-parent home in which the parent and children learned to help each in order to get by (acts of service).

While learning more about love languages can help improve the quality of your romantic relationship, the concepts can be applied to relationships with other friends and family as well. Also, the more we learn about our own love languages the better we can articulate our needs and wants to our partners, families and friends. Happy loving!