Chapter 12: Love the Unloving

Love the Unloving

Is it possible to love someone whom you hate?

Our condemning words to each other had brought us hurt and, on the heels of hurt, anger.

We had realized that if we continued our pattern of demanding and condemning, we would destroy our marriage.

We have learn to discuss our differences without condemning each other and how to make a decision without destroy ping our unity...

When we started speaking each other's primary love language the feeling of anger and hate abated

...His attitude was: "I don't have any problem. You are the one with the problem."

In his mind he was right, she was wrong-- it was as simple as that.

Her feeling of love for him had been killed through the years by his constant criticism and condemnation.

LOVE'S GREATEST CHALLENGE

I surmised that perhaps her only hope for marital survival was in her faith.  

I tell you who hear me: live your enemies and do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you... Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even "sinners" live those who live them. Luke 6:27-28, 31-32

THE SIX-MONTH EXPERIENCE

Since love is such a deeply emotional need, the lack of it is perhaps our deepest emotional pain.

The emotional need for live is our deepest emotional need; and when that need is being met, we tend to respond positively it the person who is meeting it.

Stop all the verbal complaints, if you want to complain about something, write it down in your personal notebook rather than saying anything about it for a month

Ask God to help you practice the teaching of Jesus in Luke 6:27-28; 31-32

If you express an act of love that is designed for the other person's benefit or pleasure, it is simply a choice. You are not claiming that the action grows out of a deep emotional bounding. You simply choosing to do something for the other persons benefit.

Whatever your spouse says take it as information...

After a positive feedback, make a request of your spouse -- something that you would like him to do, something in keeping with your primary love language.

Make the request specific, not general...

Keep records on the positive words of affirmation that you give your spouse each week. 

Write down your frustration ps and irritations without telling your spouse

Learn how to share your frustrations and irritations in a constructive way...

Tell your spouse that you have been thinking about your marriage and have decided that you would like to do a better job of meeting his/her needs.

If your spouse starts speaking your love language by responding to your requests, your positive emotions toward him/her will return, and in time your marriage will be reborn.

CHAPTER 11: Love Makes the Difference

Love Makes the Difference

The need for significant is the emotional force behind much of, our behavior.

Feeling love by a wife or husband enhances our sense of significance.

I am significant.

Life has meaning.

There is a higher purpose

Without love, I may spend a life time in search of significance, self-worth, and security.

I may not feel significant until someone expresses love to me

Live is not the answer to everything, but it creates a climate of security in which we can seek answers to those things that bother us.

In the security of love:

1. A couple can discuss difference without condemnation 

2. Conflicts can be resolved

3. Two people who are different can learn to live together in harmony

4. We discover how to bring out the best in each other

Those are the rewards of a secure love.

 

WE ARE LIKE ROOMMATES

We don't ever talk. He is always doing something. I wan him to sit on the couch with me and  give me some time, look at me, talk to me about us, about our lives. (SCEAMS, QUALITY TIME)

A perfect wife would be a wife who would come home in the afternoon and fix dinner for (us). ...she would wash the dishes. ...She would sew the buttons on my shirt when they fall off. (SCREAMS, Acts of Service)

 

Can emotional love be reborn in a marriage? You bet.

The key is to learn the primary live language of your spouse and choose to speak it.

The 5 Love Language, Chapter 15: LOVE IS A CHOICE

How can we speak each other's love language when we have full of hurt, anger, and resentment over our past failures?

We have the capacity to make poor choices, which all of us have done.

Poor choices in the past does not mean that we must make them in the future. Instead we can say, "I'm sorry. I know I have hurt you, but I would like to make the future different.

Love does not erase the past, but it makes the future different.

"I just don't love her anymore"

The in-love experience temporarily meets one's emotional need for love.

If I learn emotional love Language of my spouse and speak it frequently, she will continue to feel loved.

Meeting my wife's need for love is a choice I make each day.  

Few men, suffering from an empty emotional love tank, leave their marriage until they have prospects of meeting that need somewhere else.

True, long-lasting emotional love is a choice and that emotional love could be reborn in his marriage if he and his wife learned to love each other in the right love language.

Actions and Emotions

The key to the rebirth of their marriage was discovering each other's primary love language and choosing to speak it frequently.

You see, when an action does not come naturally to you, it is greater expression of love

Love is something you do for someone else, not something you do for yourself.

We discover the primary love language of our spouse, and we choose to speak it whether or not it is natural for us.

We want to meet our spouse's emotional need, and we reach out to speak his love language. In so doing his emotional tank is filled and chances are he will reciprocate and speak our love language .

Love is a choice. And either partner can start the process today..

 

CHAPTER 3: FALLING IN LOVE

FALLING IN LOVE

She was by nature a conscientious, caring person, so it was completely out of character for her to show up at my office unannounced. 

" How are you today, Janice?" I asked

" Great!" She said. " I have never been better in my I've. I am getting married!"

" That's exciting. How long have you been dating?"

" Three weeks." I know it's crazy...

" I know it's crazy,. But I am so happy. I have never been this happy in my life."

What happened to Janice? She has falling in love.

Most of us enter marriage by way of the in-love experience.

When it (the feeling) is reciprocal, we start talking about marriage because everyone agrees that being "in love" is the necessary foundation for a goo marriage.

The Anteroom of Heaven

The person who is "in love" ...has the allusion that her beloved is perfect.

Of course, we are not totally naive. We know intellectually that we will eventually have differences. But we are certain we will discuss those differences openly; one of us will always be willing to make concessions, and we will reach agreement.

It is hard to believe anything else when you are in love

Our love us the most wonderful thing we ever experienced. We observe that some married couples seem to have lost that feeling, but it will never happen to us. "Maybe they didn't have the real thing"

After studying scores of couples, she concluded that the average life span of a romantic obsession is two years. If it is a secretive love affair, it may last a little longer. Eventually, however, we all descend from the cloud and plant our feet on earth again.

Our eyes are opened, we see the warts of the other person.

Those little traits that we overlooked when we were in love now becomes huge mountains.

Reality Intrudes

It (Marriage) is a world where shoes do not walk to the closet and drawers do not close themselves, where coats do not like hangers and socks go AWOL during the laundry.

Did we really have the "real" thing? I think so. The problem is faulty information.

The bad information was the ideal that the in-love obsession would last forever.

...people who are "in love" lose interest in other pursuits. That is why it is called obsession.

Such obsession gives us the false sense that our egocentric attitude have been eradicated and we have become sort of a Mother Teresa, willing to give anything for the benefit of out lover.

Their minds have not melded together, and their emotions mingled only briefly in the ocean of love. Now the waves of the reality begin to separate them. They fall out of love, and at that point either they withdraw, separate, divorce, and set off in search of a new in-love experience, or they begin the hard work of learning to love each other without the euphoria of the in-love obsession.

We can recognize the in-love experience for what it was __and pursue "real love" with our spouse

Our most basic emotional need is to to fall in love but to be genuinely love by another... I need to be loved by someone who chooses to love me, who sees in me something worth loving.

That kind of love requires effort and discipline

In fact, true love cannot begin until the in-love experience has run its course.

The emotional need for love must be met if we are to have emotional health. Married adult long to feel affection and love from their spouse. We feel secure when we are assured that our mate accepts us, wants us, and is committed to our well-being. 

During that in-love stage, we felt all those emotions. It was heavenly while it lasted. Our mistake was in thinking it would last forever

That is good news to married couple who have lost all I'd their "in-love" feelings. If love is a choice, then they have the capacity to love after the "in-love" obsession has died and the have return to the real world.

Love is an attitude that says, "I am married to you, and I choose to look out for your interests.

Discussion questions:

Does it mean it is impossible for the "in-love" phenomenon to last forever?

Does this applies to family as we well?

What is the first step of restoring love when the in-love obsession dies down?

How can we apply all this to our day to day relationships with other?

Here is the website where you can take the test to know your Love Language:

http://www.5lovelanguages.com/profile/

Chapter 2: Keeping the Love Tank Full

KEEPING THE LOVE TANK FULL

Love is the most important word in the English lanGuage and the most confusing.

... To feel love is the primary human emotional need. For love, we will climb mountains, cross seas, traverse desert sands, and endure untold hardships. Without love, mountains become unclimbable, seas uncrossable, desert unbearable, and hardships our lot in life.

We use it in thousand of ways. We say, " I love hot dogs," and in the next breath, " I love my mother." 

Child psychologist affirms that every child has certain basic emotional needs that must be met if he is to be emotionally stable. Among those emotional needs, none is more basic than the need for love and affection, the need to sense that he or she belongs and is wanted. With an adequate supply of affection, the child will likely develop into a responsible adult. Without that love, he or she will be emotionally and socially challenged.

I like the metaphor the first time I heard it: "Inside every child is an emotional thank waiting to be filled with love. When a child really feel love, he will develop normally, but when the love tank is empty, the child will misbehave. So much of the misbehavior of children is motivated by the craving of an empty 'love tank'"

The emotional need for love, however, is not only a childhood phenomenon. That need follows us into adulthood and into marriage.

After we come down from from the "in love" obsession, the emotional need for love resurfaces because it is fundamental to our nature. It is at the center of our emotional desires. 

We needed love before we "fell in love..."

The need to feel loved by Inez's spouse is at the heart of marital desires.

Marital things are no replacement for human, emotional love.

OUR CRY FOR LOVE

A the heart of humankind's existence is the desire to be loved by another. Marriage is designed to meet that need for I it achy and love. That is why the ancient Biblical writing spoke of the husband and wife becoming "one flesh." That does to mean that individuals would loose their identity.

Could it be that deep inside hurting couples exist an invisible "emotional love tank" with its gauge at empty?

Could that tank be the key that makes marriage work?

I am convinced that keeping the emotional love tank full is as important to a marriage as maintaining the proper oil level is to an automobile.

WARNING: Understanding the five love languages and learning to speak the primary love language of your spouse may racially affect his or her behavior. People behave differently when when their emotional love tanks are full.

DISCUSSION QUESTION: 

What is love?

What do you think of the love tank?

Can it possibly be the answer to all our relational problems?

How can understanding the Love Tank help us minister better to those God sends to FBC?



Here is the website where you can take the test to know your Love Language:

http://www.5lovelanguages.com/profile/

Chapter One: What Happens To Love After The Wedding?

What Happens To Love After The Wedding?

It was wonderful before we got married, but somehow after the wedding everything fell apart.  All the love I thought I had for her and the love she seemed to have for me evaporated.

I can believe it happened to me three time

The desire for romantic love is deeply rooted in our psychological makeup

Keeping love alive in our marriages is serious business

The Truth We're Missing

People speak different Love Languages

If we are to communicate effectively across cultural line, we must learn the language of those with whom we wish to communicate with

Your emotional language and the language of your spouse (co-worker, friends, family members, church member) could be as different as Chinese from English

My friend on the plan  was speaking the language of "Affirming Words" to his third wife when he said, "I told how beautiful she was..."

Perhaps she was looking for love in his behavior and did not see it. Being sincere is  not enough


There are  not 10, 20, 365 basic love languages. In my opinion there are only five. However, there may be numerous dialects (of Love)

Seldom do a husband and wife, ( two friends, co-workers etc...)  have the same emotional love language

We tend to speak our primary love language, and and we become confused when  our spouse don't understand what we are communicating. We are expressing our love, but the message does not come through because we are speaking what, to them, is as a foreign language.

Once you have learned to speak your spouse's primary love language, I believe that you will have discovered the key to a long lasting, loving marriage.

Love need not to evaporate the wedding, but in order to keep it alive most of us will have to put in the effort to learn a secondary love language.



Discussion Questions:

1. Does the Five Love Language only apply to a marriage or romantic relationship?

2. Is it possible to apply these languages to friends, co-workers, church members, and family?

3. How is one's love language form?

4. If we answered #2 Yes, How can we at Friendship use this book to better communicate the love of Christ to them in ways they would understand?

Here is the website where you can take the test to know your Love Language:

http://www.5lovelanguages.com/profile/