Not 4 publication

I left our marriage encounter meeting on Saturday feeling reassured and secure.  Faye and Clive hosted and presented; their talk was on The Five Love Languages.  Gary Chapman's basic premise is that too many marriages fail because the way each member expresses their love doesn't align with how their partner best receives it, so they never recharge their respective "love tank."  But it isn't simply a matter of compatibility.  It's just important to know, so we can express our love in the way our partner can best receive it.  It's far easier to make an active decision how to express our love than to recognize and receive it in a way that isn't in our primary or secondary language.

I've been struggling to see how my marriage is going to rebalance in light of establishing a healthy view of the two of us for probably the first time in our lives together.  One of the things that has been a concern to me, the thing at the root of what I've had to be careful how I think about, is how few interests we share in common.  It has been the basis for that niggling thought I've had to put away: if I'd been a healthy young adult (for that matter, had either of us been), I doubt we would ever have been a couple.

But I learned on Saturday that we have the same primary and secondary love languages - though I wonder if that would have been the case had we taken our surveys based solely on our own natural  preferences, unfiltered by what we've learned to prefer in the context of our relationship together.  Still, I found it reassuring: (am going to overuse that word) that there's good reason we've managed to preserve our relationship through so much emotional devastation and despite our very different personalities and interests, and good reason to hope we'll be able to continue to thrive in the future.

So discovering that our coupleness is reinforced by our primary and secondary love language preferences helps me to understand how we've survived all that we have, how we can love each other so much in spite of everything.  Sunday morning we had a wonderful, intimate time together, and considering that 1) "physical touch" is our primary love language, 2) this has been the area of our relationship in which we struggle least, and 3) we were really aware of our need to be quiet for the sake of the others in the house,  that's really saying something.  (Hopefully rather than weirding the reader out, this will encourage you that you have something really nice to look forward to as time goes by.)  We both mentioned it during the day, alluded to it in our dialogue last night, and the mrs. brought up again as we snuggled in bed how wonderfully the day had started.

Then she asked the $64,000 (more, really) question.  I really wish she'd've skipped it.  I answered affirmatively and supportively, and without giving a clue that I've been wondering for months myself about this exact question.

"We're more than that, right?"

So this morning I'm trying to just feel reassured that she'd wonder, too.  Isn't it interesting that we're both pondering this question?  That's something else we have in common, right?

I'm not being facetious with that.  I really think it may be another hopeful thing.  I'm more concerned that I thought it more important to reassure her than to be honest with her.