Photo by: Tiera Faith Photography
How long have you been with your significant other? Are you dating, engaged, married, or married with kids? Say your not even dating, this is something I feel is still beneficial for you now or in the future. Okay, have you even thought about your love language? Do you even know what I'm talking about? Well if you don't, I highly recommend reading The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman.
So here is some mushy mush for you! I love my husband. If you ever meet him or if you know him, you know he is one of a kind. Like any couple he has somethings that just get under my skin, but even if I get so mad I want to scream, he can some how still make me laugh and forget why I was even mad. He has the kindest heart I know. I have friends saying can you find me a Garrett, because I need one of those! Sorry ladies he is taken for Life!
So, that one August night when he asked me to marry him, a story I hope to share at a later date, started the journey to where we are now. After being engaged, we found out that our church offered an engagement class. I first thought, why would we take this class, we have known each other since we were in middle school. We grew up in church together, and had all the same friends throughout that time. We knew each other as friends, as boyfriend and girlfriend, and then as fiances. Then, we found out this class that we could take would get us a discount on our marriage license. SOLD. We were looking for any way to save money during the wedding planning process. As we started this class it was just for us to save money, but little did we know this class would be something we still talk about a year and half later.
Photo by: Tiera Faith Photography
As we sat in a room full of couples, we quickly figured out this class was not just for us to save a couple of dollars, but it was to help us grow together. Like I said, we have known each other for a long time. He somehow wanted to be friends with the middle school me who was completely awkward. Then we somewhat went through our growing age and then we both decided to calm down at the same time and finally see each other more than just friends. In this class we talked about family, budgeting, and just starting a life and how to cope with change. Marriage does change your life! Our favorite part about this class was taking the love language test to see what we would be. After answering a slew of questions on a test, we tallied up are score and found out more about ourselves. We figured that this would make our lives easier by helping us never fight and always know how to make our spouse happy. This is not the case, marriage is hard and issues will arise and you have to push through them, but knowing your spouses love language will help show each other you care. Want to know what ours were? Mine was words of affirmation, and his was receiving gifts.
We both felt like this was perfect. Going through the journey of planning a wedding is hard! I have never done something so hard in my life. I try to please everyone, which I know it cant be done, but I still try. Sometimes when I try to please people, I only end up hurting myself. I did feel like I needed that extra form of affirmation, just to know I was doing something right, that I was pleasing someone. With Garrett being my partner and knowing me inside and out, he always had the right things to say and how I just needed to worry about us and no one else. This helped us through all of the unsure, which helped us get to the married part with less stress.
Garrett's love language was receiving gifts. He is not one really big on gifts. He thinks gifts take a lot of thought. He sometimes freaks himself out trying to think of something to get someone. I feel like his love language was receiving gifts because I was independent living in a house of girlfriends, who I only had to worry about my laundry, my rent, and my food. I had extra money to blow, because obviously I was not worried about saving money... thank you young 20 something year old Trisha. :) I used my money to make gifts and or to spoil Garrett. I enjoyed the excitement I got to thinking about what he would say and do while opening something from me. I never got the reaction I wanted because as sweet as he is he is so hard to read. He will seem excited and will thank you all day, but its hard to tell if he is actually excited or not. This being said, I think he had gifts on the brain. I bought a lot of gifts back in the day.
Photo by: Tiera Faith Photography
Now, being married for over a year and half and living together, this is were the change comes in. We had spent a lot of time together over the years, but never night after night. We also have never lived in a 750 square foot apartment with one bedroom and one bath. This alone can change a person.
One Tuesday night, while attending a church service called Kairos with my sister in law, who I love so much. Our Pastor Chris Brooks, decided to bring up love languages. If you want to hear a guy who can make you cry and laugh in about 30 seconds, he is your guy! He is awesome, and I enjoy hearing him speak each week. He talked about his love language and how he feels it's helpful knowing the people around you's love language. I think this is a great thing. I would love to know the love language of people around me. That being said, my sister-in-law and I were on our way home when we talked about what each of ours were. I know I can remember most things, but for some reason I could not remember what my love language was. I told her what Garrett's was, but I could not think of my own. This had me wondering all the way back to the apartment.
Once I walked in the door, I went straight over to our building blocks of marriage binder ( this was the engagement class we took). I opened it up to our love language test. As I was going back over it, I realized that some of my answers may have changed by now. I decided I would personally ask Garrett each question and see how much his changes. To my surprise, his answers had changed some as well. I tallied up his test and then proceeded to let Garrett ask me questions and tally up those as well. Once we did the test again, I ended up getting acts of service and this time he got quality time. We once again felt that both of these were so us. I am a full time nanny and now personal assist for a family. I have a responsibility to care and remember things for a family of five and still find the time to remember and care for my family of three ( two humans and a dog). I enjoy my job, but sometimes it can be a lot of work, especially doing all that work and then coming home to do some more work for ourselves. This is life right? I would not say I was spoiled, but being so depended on is sometimes overwhelming and not something I was not used to. Garrett now works somewhat different hours than I, and we find it hard to balance our time together. We usually have things to get done or to do during the weekend, and during the week it's hard enough staying awake to have time together. This leaves us with very little sit and chat alone time. He has always been big on spending time together no matter what we were doing.
This just shows that in any relationship you grow together and embrace each others love language. Maybe your love language has and will always stay the same, but for us we seem to change depending on how our life is at the time. I love growing and learning new things about myself and about my hubby! I try my best to spend as much quality time as I can. I sure hope this post was interesting and has helped you think more into your own love laungage!
Don't forget to comment below your love language and let me know what you think!
xoxo
Trisha
Photo by: Tiera Faith Photography
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