Love is a Verb

Talk is cheap when it comes to loving someone. I've seen way too much evidence that people think saying "I love you" is enough. So I'll skip the lecture and get to the bottom line.

Love is a verb. To love someone means taking every opportunity to demonstrate it through acts that support the statement, "I love you." The words are otherwise hollow.

Salvatore Minuchin, one of the greats of family therapy, opened a conference on couples therapy by asking, "Why is it that we fall in love with someone for all the ways that that person is unique and different from us, and then spend the rest of the relationship trying to make them into carbon copies of ourselves?" The answer: ego. We tend to let our own personal and biased view of the world get in the way of clearly seeing what is meaningful and beneficial to our partner.

Gary Chapman's book, The Five Love Languages, is among my top ten reference books for couples. His thesis goes like this: there are five categories that capture all the ways there are to show love to someone. They are:

• words of affirmation


• quality time together


• gifts


• acts of service


• physical touch

Each person ranks the importance of the five differently. We do our best job of loving someone when we know the rank order that person puts them in and act accordingly. Seems simple, but then there's that tricky little ego. It gets in the way. Instead of acting according to our loved one's preferences, we act from our own. Example.

Bobbie and Steve had been making significant progress in therapy. When I commended them on their efforts, Bobbie said, "Yes, but wait, it's almost Valentine's Day. We have had a huge fight every Valentine's Day for the past ten years."

Here's their story, repeated every year.

Steve: "What would you like for Valentine's Day, Bobbie?" (Notice, his heart is in the right place.)

Bobbie: "I just want you to send me flowers at work." (Her favorite love language looks like gifts, but is really words of affirmation. In her case, public affirmation.)

Steve: "That's not good enough for you. I want to buy you something expensive. And besides, sending flowers wouldn't be a surprise." (One more testimony to the overrated worth of surprises. See Really Big Birthdays.)

So V-day would come, she'd cry when she opened the diamond bracelet, he'd get angry at her lack of appreciation (notice the tricky little ego getting in his way?) and they'd go into yet another month long cold war. (By the way, he's the one who loves the expensive clothes and jewelry.)

After hearing this story and the arguments that ensued in my office, I decided to meet with him alone. If I were Dr. Phil, I would have said, "So, the expensive gifts, how's that workin' for ya?" But I'm not, so I taught him about the love languages, and suggested he try it her way just this once.

Convincing him was harder than herding cats. (Sometimes the power of the ego can be daunting.) But he did in fact send her flowers at work. She was ecstatic. He was proud he could please her. Therapy ended shortly thereafter. (I bet you didn't know that good therapy is about working yourself out of a job.) PS He still sends her flowers every Valentine's Day.

You too can try the love languages approach. Here are the three simple steps.

1. Ask your partner to rank order the list.
2. Start behaving accordingly.
3. Give your ego a swift kick every time it tries to get in the way.

Copyright starfishdoc 2007