“Teachme”

A Discussion on Love Languages and How We Receive Them Vs. How We Give Them.

There’s something almost offensive about hearing someone you love say they don’t feel loved by you.

Excuse me?

Because in your mind, you’ve been loving the hell out of them. You’ve checked in. You’ve made plans. You’ve bought the thoughtful little things. You’ve remembered the details. You’ve made yourself available. You’ve done all the things that, to you, say:

I love you. I choose you. You matter to me.

And somehow, they’re standing in front of you feeling like they haven’t been loved at all.

That’s the part of love languages I don’t think we talk about enough.

We talk about them like personality quizzes. What’s yours? Mine is quality time. His is physical touch. Cute. Good to know. But knowing someone’s love language and actually loving them in it are two entirely different things. And sometimes, you can love someone deeply while accidentally leaving them starving.

I Know What Love Feels Like to Me

My love languages are quality time and physical touch.

And I don’t mean that in the cute, take me on dates and hold my hand kind of way. Those things create connection for me. I can hear “I love you.” I can know intellectually that someone cares about me. I can understand that they’re busy, that life is happening, that there are a million perfectly reasonable explanations for why we haven’t spent much time together, but after a while, if I don’t have the time and the touch, something in me starts to disconnect.

I mean…not intentionally. I don’t wake up one morning and decide, well, I guess I don’t care anymore. It’s quieter than that. I start feeling farther away. Because quality time is where I experience intimacy. It’s the conversations that don’t need to end. Sitting next to each other doing absolutely nothing. Running errands. Dinner. Traveling. Watching something stupid on television. Existing in the same space long enough that neither of us has to perform.

And physical touch is reassurance without words. It’s reaching for me when you walk past. A hand on my leg. A kiss on my forehead. Sleeping close enough that some part of us is touching. Those things may seem small to someone whose brain doesn’t register love that way.

To me, they’re not small at all. They’re connection. If you take them away long enough, I can be completely aware that someone loves me while simultaneously beginning to feel unloved by them.

That’s a strange place to be.

Loving You the Way I Love Me

Most of us aren’t intentionally selfish lovers, but I think we can be unintentionally self-centered in the way we express love. We naturally give people what we would want to receive.

If words make you feel secure, you say “I love you.” You send the long text. You tell your person how proud you are of them.

If acts of service make you feel cared for, you’re fixing things, handling errands and making their life easier.

If gifts communicate love to you, you notice something in a store that reminds you of them and bring it home.

And because those things would make you feel deeply loved, it can be genuinely confusing when your partner receives all of it and still says:

“Something is missing.”

The instinctive response is defensiveness.

How can you possibly say I don’t love you after everything I do?

But maybe the question isn’t whether you’re loving them. Maybe the question is whether they can feel it.

Intention Isn’t Always Reception

Love has a sender and a receiver and sometimes the message gets lost in translation. Someone could tell me “I love you” every single day. I would believe them, but if we rarely spend meaningful time together, eventually I’m going to feel the distance.

That’s not me saying their words are meaningless. It’s me saying words aren’t where my heart receives the strongest signal. Someone else’s experience might be completely different. Maybe their partner rearranges an entire afternoon to help them solve a problem, but what they’ve desperately needed is to hear, I’m proud of you. Maybe they’re showered with gifts when what they actually want is an uninterrupted Saturday morning together. Maybe their partner says “I love you” constantly, but they’re craving the simple intimacy of being touched. Neither person necessarily loves more. They’re speaking different languages.

One person is saying:

“Look at everything I’m doing to love you.”

And the other is saying:

“I know. But I’m still hungry.”

That’s where relationships can become painful, because being loved and feeling loved aren’t always the same experience.

Detachment Doesn’t Always Mean the Love Is Gone

This is the part I’ve been thinking about the most.

Sometimes when people begin feeling disconnected in relationships, we immediately start asking whether their feelings have changed. Maybe they haven’t. Maybe the connection hasn’t been fed. For me, quality time and physical touch aren’t bonuses I get once everything else in a relationship is going well. They’re part of how I maintain emotional closeness. Without them for long enough, I detach. That doesn’t mean I suddenly stop loving someone.

It means I start losing access to the places where I feel our love and I think that’s an important distinction because sometimes your partner isn’t asking for more because they’re needy, ungrateful or impossible to satisfy. They may be trying to tell you:

“I need to experience you in the places where love makes sense to me.”

Learning Someone Is Part of Loving Them

There is something incredibly intimate about learning how another person receives love. Not assuming. Not deciding for them. Learning. What makes them soften? What makes them feel safe? What makes them feel remembered? What makes them feel chosen? What do they repeatedly ask for that you’ve dismissed because it seems small to you?

Sometimes your partner has been telling you their love language without ever saying the words love language.

“Can we spend some time together?”

“Tell me when you get home.”

“Can you just hold me?”

“I wish you would tell me how you feel.”

“You didn’t have to do that for me.”

Those sentences are information and paying attention to that information is part of intimacy.

Love Requires Translation

Loving someone in their language doesn’t mean abandoning your own. Relationships shouldn’t become one person constantly performing love exactly the way the other person demands while their own needs disappear. The goal is translation in both directions.

I learn your language. You learn mine. And somewhere in the middle, we create one that belongs to us. Maybe that means I learn to recognize the ways you’re already loving me, even when they aren’t the ways I naturally look for love, but it also means you understand that sometimes I need you next to me. Sometimes I need your hand in mine. Sometimes “I love you” needs to become come here.

That’s the compromise.

Not demanding that another person become exactly like you. Not telling yourself you shouldn’t need what you need. Learning how to recognize their love while teaching them how to reach you with it.

So, I Love You. But Can You Feel It?

Maybe that’s a question worth asking the people we love.

Not: “Don’t you know how much I love you?”

But: “Do you feel loved by me?”

Those are two very different questions and if the answer makes us uncomfortable, maybe we don’t immediately defend ourselves. Maybe we get curious because sometimes the problem isn’t an absence of love.

Sometimes there is an abundance of it.

It’s simply being spoken in a language the other person doesn’t understand.

And if I love you enough to say it, I should love you enough to learn how you hear it.

Jess

XoXo