When I discovered “The Five Love Languages” by Gary Chapman my world was turned upside down…in a good way. Chapman’s theory is that there are five primary love languages and that each of us tends to have one language we give and receive love in the most often and the most easily. He says that often people are trying to express love, but those efforts are not getting received as love by the other person. This struck a chord for me particularly in my relationship with my dad.
After learning more about these five languages, I began to realize that although I had spent much of my life thinking that my dad didn’t love me as deeply as I wanted him to, in reality, he’d been loving me all along, I just hadn’t recognized his efforts as love!