Do men and women speak the same love language?

Do men and women speaking the same language? Do they express love the same way? While love is a many splendour thing, it is sometimes a very confusing thing, too. And as people come in all varieties, shapes, and sizes, so do our choices of personal expressions of love.  Love is a language, and every one of us speaks our own personal dialect. There are infinite love languages co-existing on the planet and often we are in partnership with someone who speaks a radically different love language than our own heart's mother tongue. In such cases, we love each other, but we don't know how to express our love to our partner the way he/she feels love and our partners don't express love toward us the way we feel love.  

The expression of #love and connection that was intended by one person, sadly, can creates a rupture between the #couple and contributes to one partner's sense of isolation. 

For example a woman might express her problems with her partner not because she wants him to solve it to her but to listen to her. But a man might  take that as a sign that she is expecting him to come up with practical solution. Then the woman would be left feeling  deprived, empty, and not known, since what she needs to feel loved has not occurred and, perhaps even more painfully, is not understood. So too, she feels guilty that she cannot be more loving about receiving what she does not really crave. The #man, too, is left suffering, feeling confused, helpless, and sometimes even resentful, having #communicated love in his #emotional #language and yet received a response that does not match with his heart. What started out as an attempt to connect ends up in a profound chasm.

Even though it is not always true, women often experience and express love through some form of emotional connection. We feel loved when we feel understood, listened to, and deeply known. Love happens when what is important to us is held, remembered and acknowledged by our partner, when our emotional needs are treated as a priority. We often feel loved through intimate touch - by being caressed, by back rub, etc.  Most importantly, it is a touch that comes with no demand/expectation (sexual or otherwise) behind it -- something we can receive without having to give anything back in return.

On the other hand, men often express love through the language of doing, fixing, providing, and other such practical offerings, as well as sex.The ma is feeling and showing love when he fix the kitchen cabinet or invites his wife into the bedroom -- but it is what love means to him, not her.

So what are we to do with these divides and fundamentally different #emotional languages? Can we ever get what we really need when it comes to love, given that we perceive, feel, experience and communicate in such fundamentally different ways? If we want emotional connection and #intimate touch, and instead receive the invitation for #sex or if we want practical advice and instead we receive back rub, should we give up on getting to have the direct experience of love -- to feel it, not just know it?

The "experts" advise us that it is our job to understand our partner's emotional language and be able to translate it into our own. We are taught that whatever he or she did for us "should" be enough, and "should" adequately fill our hearts. And furthermore, that we "should" be grateful for her/his efforts to love us. A reasonable and rational love is a good thing for sure, but as empowered men and women,  we also know that we can ask for and create even something even more.

Emotional nourishment is fundamental to our well-being and thus it is important for us to try and create a partnership in which we actually experience it. When our partner demonstrates love in his language, he gets to feel it, but we do not, not in its immediacy. This is the sadness and the gap that leaves us lonely. Living on intention and "should"s after a while is like subsisting on fumes. We can't survive on it, not if we want to be truly well. The direct experience of love is the soul's food.

In truth, the knowledge of our partner's intention may not be enough, even when we remind ourselves that it is an intention of love. It is okay if intention is not enough. 

Instead of expending our energy becoming more skilful at explaining love to our hearts and getting better at living with not enough, we need to turn our efforts to receiving what we actually need. We are better off using our energy to teach our partners how to communicate (and thus provide us) love in the emotional language that our heart actually speaks. All of it takes a lot of energy, so why not spend it trying to be truly fed? Ultimately, we want to be able to throw away our emotional thesauruses, love apps, and self-help books and kick the experts out of the room -- to experience love with just our heart.

We can ask for, participate in and commit to getting the full and direct experience that is love. After all, to love someone truly is to be interested and willing to create the experience that is love for them, and thus to become truly bilingual in the language of the heart. Learn to speak and understand your mate's love language, and in no time you will be able to effectively love and truly feel loved in return. Skilful communication is within our grasp, if we are willing to learn.