5. Service member, conspire with some mutual friends or church members to have care packages delivered to your spouse’s doorstep on holidays or ordinary days.
6. Home front spouse, put together a themed care package with memories of one of your special days you shared together.
7. Create a coupon book for your spouse to redeem when you are together again.
8. During the Christmas holidays, send the service member a stocking filled with goodies. Make him his favorite Christmas cookies; send him a very small, decorated Christmas tree, or something that will have great meaning to him.
9. Celebrate Valentine’s Day with special cards and gifts that are meaningful to you as a couple. Also remember birthdays, your anniversary, and Military Spouse Appreciation Day, which always falls on the Friday before Mother’s Day.
10. Service member, order gifts online—books, flowers, coffee, restaurant gift cards—and have them sent directly to your spouse—no special occasion required.
THE 5 LOVE LANGUAGES?
LOVE LANGUAGE #4
Acts of Service
The ink was barely dry on their marriage certificate when Erin and Nathan moved to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for a nine-month assignment. Unaccustomed to military life, Erin was lonely in her new environment and not intellectually challenged the way she had been in the career she had just given up. And, she didn’t know the first thing about how to be an Army wife. Nathan was busy in his new job and completely clueless as to why his bride was growing frustrated and resentful.
“He didn’t realize I needed help to learn how to do the simplest things like getting an identification card so I could shop at the store, learning how to cash a check at the post bank, going to the doctor, or navigating the many offices and rules on post,” said Erin. She felt thrown into a life where she knew very little, and Nathan was not speaking her love language to help her learn.
Erin’s primary love language was what I call “acts of service.” By acts of service, I mean doing things you know your spouse would like you to do. You seek to please her by serving her, to express your love for her by doing things for her. So it was with Doug, whom we met in the last chapter.
In a military marriage, “dependents” depend on the service member for help with certain tasks, such as getting an ID card, updating DEERS insurance accounts, securing passports, and finance or housing issues. All spouses need their service member to assist in these things (unless power of attorney allows otherwise), but spouses whose love language is acts of service will feel especially hurt, as Erin did, if their service members don’t provide this help. Other day-to-day actions such as cooking a meal, setting a table, washing dishes, vacuuming, cleaning a commode, changing the baby’s diaper, dusting the bookcase, keeping the car in operating condition, paying the bills, trimming the shrubs, walking the dog, changing the cat’s litter box, and dealing with landlords and insurance companies are all acts of service. They require thought, planning, time, effort, and energy. If done with a positive spirit, they are indeed expressions of love.
Unfortunately, it never occurred to Nathan that Erin would need help with the basic aspects of adjusting to military life, and since she didn’t feel loved and cared for by him, she withdrew physically from him. When he, in turn, seemed even less loving to her, she began to guess at possible reasons, ranging from regretting marrying her, to marrying her just to have a military spouse at his side in his career. “I learned and resented the old saying, ‘If the Army would have wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one,’” Erin said.
A deployment, with its inherent communication breakdowns, only heightened tensions between them. “She seemed to hate military life,” Nathan said. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just worked harder to provide for us and avoided any arguments.” In the meantime, on the home front, Erin volunteered at Army Community Service, where she was trained to teach new Army wives all about Army life.
Eventually, a chaplain gave Erin and Nathan tickets to attend a marriage seminar, and they discovered The 5 Love Languages. Finally, Erin and Nathan understood why they both felt frustrated. “We still loved each other very much, but being apart and living a demanding military life with many deployments made it far more difficult to speak the love languages of physical touch and acts of service,” said Erin.