Your first love language is always empowering when you speak it.  If you feel better when your sweetie waltzes through the door with a fresh bouquet of roses in their hand, then you feel like a savior when you buy them roses.

You feel the satisfaction because you map your own desires onto them.  You go “Wow, I’d feel great if they brought me roses, so they must feel great!  And I’m a great person for doing this!”

Which works, as long as your lover’s spirits are actually raised by roses.

My wife wants the house cleaned.

Which is weird: my love languages are very verbal and very gifty, whereas Gini’s are silent and practical.  Did you pay the fucking bills?  Did you clean the fucking house?  Yeah?  Then you love me.

Cleaning the kitchen doesn’t feel like love.  It feels like some sort of weird performance art.  Here she is, upset and needing roses, and I’m in the other room washing crusty oatmeal out of a dish.

It feels fake.

Trick is, speaking a new love language always feels fake.  You’re not doing something that makes you feel loved, so you’re going through the motions – acting on something that leaves you emotionless.

It feels scripted and passionless.  That’s because it is scripted and passionless.  When you’ve got a partner who speaks a different love language than you do, you can’t improvise your way into their heart; they have to tell you, precisely, what to do, and then you carry it out.

Shit, if you could speak their language naturally, they wouldn’t have to script it out for you.

If you’re not a hugger, hugging someone who’s crying feels stiff and terrible.  If you’re not a talker, then practicing active feedback while your lover unloads their emotions all over your face feels like a scripted exercise.  If you’re not a gift person, then opening up your wallet at Wal-Mart has you wondering, How’s this stupid trinket going to work?

And this is where a lot of relationships fall apart, because people start conflating their own emotional satisfaction with their partner’s satisfaction – “I don’t feel good about leaving them alone in a room when they’re upset.  So this can’t be good.”  They may even get offended that their partner would ask them to do this silly thing, because this silly thing doesn’t matter and why can’t they be smart enough to want the things that really mean love?

The end result is that they flip out and fall back on their old go-tos – you know, the ones that make them feel good and leave their partner cold – and hey, amazingly, it doesn’t work out.

But if you can spend a few months sitting with the awkwardness of performance mode, you’ll eventually get to see that they are satisfied.  Lots of people walk away before seeing their partner’s relieved smile enough times to internalize that yes, this performative act actually makes them feel better.

Years later, washing the dishes isn’t a romantic act for me.  I wouldn’t say I feel romance pounding in my veins when I sweep the floor.

But I know my wife.  I know when she wakes, she’ll realize I spent twenty minutes tidying up, and I’ll see that silly smile on her face.  And even though this would do nothing for me, I’ve stuck with it long enough to recognize what it does for her, and so we’ve managed to cobble together a bilingual love that lasts.

That only happened, however, because we both spent several weeks working off of each others’ scripts – feeling uncertain, feeling unsettled, feeling like this can’t possibly be the right thing to do.

Only time showed that it was.  Now we know.  And now we speak fluently, if not natively, and that makes the difference on days when Gini needs not a hug, but a nice kitchen.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.