It's February, and love is in the air...actually love is in the language as far as our class in concerned. We've been talking about Gary Chapman's book The Five Love Languages (5LL) for the last couple of weeks so the topic of communication has been on my mind.
Communication is a tricky thing at the best of times. We often fail to communicate what we mean to, and when the target of our message doesn't respond as we think they should, we blame them for being unreasonable. The idea in 5LL is that even when we try hard to communicate our love, we can fail because we're talking the wrong language. We say "I love you" (see, I bought you this expensive vacuum cleaner) and our spouse either doesn't "hear" anything, or misunderstands what we're trying to say (you think the house is dirty?).
The other thing that struck me in all this discussion is that love is not about me, it's about my spouse. That's why it's so hard for us to do well. We spend a lot of our mental energy thinking about how to get what we want out of marriage. That's what a happy marriage is...one that makes me happy, right? Actually, it's not. Marriage works a lot better when we both start to put the other's interests ahead of our own. Sounds sort of Biblical, don't you think?
So that explains the "Love" and "Language" parts of the title. What about the "Obsession" part? Well, that's why there's been such a gap in posting to this blog. I've got another one too! Oh, well.
