104:69 The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman

I've had several friends talk about this book and while my marriage is probably the most stable it's ever been lately, I still felt like we could be doing even better. I wasn't sure I was doing everything I could be to show Mark how much I loved him and that was something that was important for me to know he was "hearing". I knew that there were times when I wasn't feeling it even tho I knew it was true.

After taking the quizzes in the back of the book, turns out one of my two primary Love Languages (I'm bilingual) is Acts of Service which is the one of the 5 he cares least about. Hmmmm....

We also noted that for him Physical Touch (not just in a sexual context) was very important as was Quality Time (my other biggie). I'm usually feeling pretty touched out and emotionally drained by the end of the day when he gets home so I don't tend to do a lot of smaller touches that mean more to him.

While he hasn't read it yet, I thought that just knowing these two things about ourselves and each other helped to show where we can work to improve our ways of speaking love to the other. I know that I will make more of an effort on the physical touch for him since it means so much to him because it's important to me to speak to him in the language he hears best.

On the whole, I found the book insightful without being too preachy with a lot of anecdotal stories. Most of the stories centered around couples who were having major problems which isn't my case but I have already recommended this book to my friends and really recommend it to all married couples since making sure you are both filling each other's love tanks is absolutely so important. Mark and I had sort of figured a lot of this stuff out over the 16yrs we've been married and it would have been helpful to have read the book instead of doing it all the hard way as we did, but even now reading the book still had some good insights that I plan to put into practice.

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