SHOW YOUR HUSBAND HOW YOU WANT HIM TO LOVE YOU...

I have heard ladies say to me " Aunty Muna, I'm so angry with my husband because he doesn't act like he loves me any more". And when I probe further you hear them say " oh Aunty isn't he supposed to do this, that and that?" Haba, nobody is a mind ready. Your husband is not a magician so I disagree with you saying that he is supposed to know this and that.

Love has and is a language, and every one of us speaks our own personal love language. There are very many or should I say infinite love languages co-existing on the planet and often we are in partnership with someone who speaks a radically different love language than our own heart's mother tongue. In such cases, we love each other, but we don't know how to show love to each other, not exactly. We know our partner loves us, but we don't always get to actually feel it.

For example: Husband does the grocery shopping, all the while wanting to and believing that he is expressing love for his wife by being helpful and taking care of what she needs done.
Wife feels grateful for the help, but as a vehicle of love, the good deeds leave her feeling unsatisfied and ultimately lonely. She wants more. The expression of love and connection that was intended by the husband, sadly, creates a rupture between the couple and contributes to the wife's sense of isolation. Wife is left feeling deprived, empty, and not known, since what she needs to feel loved has not occurred and, perhaps even more painfully, is not understood. So too, she feels guilty that she cannot be more loving about receiving what she does not really crave. Husband, too, is left suffering, feeling confused, helpless, and sometimes even resentful, having communicated love in his emotional language and yet received a cold response that does not match with his hearts expectations. What started out as an attempt to connect ends up in a profound chasm.

I have spoken with lots of women of different ages. While not always the case, women often experience and express love through some form of emotional connection. A woman most definitely feels loved when she feels understood, listened to, and deeply known. Love happens when what is important to her is held, remembered and acknowledged by her partner, when her emotional needs are treated as a priority. So too, women often describe feeling loved through intimate touch, that can come in the form of caressing her arm or a gently back rub in the way she likes it. Most importantly, it is a touch that comes with no demand/expectation (sexual or otherwise) behind it. Something she can receive without having to give anything back in return.

Again, radically generalizing, men often express love through the language of doing, fixing, providing, and other such practical offerings, as well as sex. The husband is feeling and showing love when he does for example again, the wahala of shopping for her on his way back from work or invites her into the bedroom for some swimming lessons lol. That is what love means to him, not her.

So what are we to do with these divides and fundamentally different emotional languages? Can we ever get what we really need when it comes to love, given that we perceive, feel, experience and communicate in such fundamentally different ways? There isn't space here to cover both sexes, and so I will talk about it from a female perspective. If, as women, we want emotional connection and intimate touch, and instead receive grocery shopping bags and the invitation for sex, should we give up on getting the direct experience of the love we crave for, that is, to feel it, and not just know it?

I read an article sometime ago, where some relationship experts advised women that our job is to understand our husband's emotional language and be able to translate it into our own. We are taught that his doing the grocery shopping "should" be enough, and "should" adequately fill our hearts. And furthermore, that we "should" be grateful for his huge efforts to love us. I agree that a reasonable and rational love is a good thing for sure, but as empowered women, I also know that we can ask for and create something even better.

Emotional nourishment is fundamental to our well-being and thus it is important for us to try and create a partnership in which we actually experience it. When our husbands demonstrate love in their language, they get to feel it, but we do not, at least not in its immediacy. This is the sadness and the gap that leaves us lonely. Living on intention and "should"s after a while is like subsisting on fumes. We can't survive on it, not if we want to be truly well. The direct experience of love is the soul's food.

In truth, the knowledge of our husband's intention may not be enough, even when we remind ourselves that it is an intention of love and It is okay if intention is not enough.

Instead of expending our energy becoming more skillful at explaining love to our hearts and getting better at living with not enough, we need to turn our efforts to receiving what we actually need. We are better off using our energy to teach our husbands how to communicate (and thus provide us) love in the emotional language that our heart actually speaks and understand. All of it takes a lot of energy, so why not spend it trying to be truly fed? Ultimately, we want to be able to throw away our emotional thesauruses, love apps, and self-help books and kick the experts out of the room to experience love with just our heart.

As women, we can ask for, participate in and commit to getting the full and direct experience that is love. After all, to love someone truly is to be interested and willing to create the experience that is love for them, and thus to become truly bilingual in the language of the heart. Bible tells us to ask and we shall receive, so let's open our lovely mouths and ask our darling husbands to give us what we want. And what do we really want? We want them to treat us the way we appreciate us and not the way they appreciate us.... One Love, Sisters. God bless.