I sympathized with Brent in his dilemma. He sincerely did not want to hurt his wife or his children, but at the same time, he felt he deserved a life of happiness. I told him the dismal statistics on second marriages. He was surprised to hear that but was certain he would beat the odds. I told him about the research on the effects of divorce on children, but he was convinced he would continue to be a good father to his children and they would get over the trauma of the divorce. I talked to Brent about the issues in this book and explained the difference between the experience of falling in love and the deep emotional need to feel loved. I explained the 5 Love Languages and challenged him to give his marriage another chance. All the while, I knew my intellectual and reasoned approach to marriage compared to the emotional high he was experiencing was like pitting a BB gun against an automatic weapon. He expressed appreciation for my concern and asked that I do everything possible to help Becky. But he assured me he saw no hope for the marriage.
One month later, I received a call from Brent. He indicated he would like to talk with me again. This time when he entered my office, he was noticeably disturbed. He was not the calm, cool man I had seen before. His lover had begun to come down off the emotional high, and she was observing things in Brent she did not like. She was withdrawing from the relationship, and he was crushed. Tears came to his eyes as he told me how much she meant to him and how unbearable it was to experience her rejection.
I listened for an hour before Brent ever asked for my advice. I told him how sympathetic I was to his pain and indicated that what he was experiencing was the natural emotional grief from a loss, and that the grief would not go away overnight. I explained, however, that the experience was inevitable. I reminded him of the temporary nature of the “in love” experience, that sooner or later, we always come down from the high to the real world. Some fall out of love before they get married; others, after they get married. He agreed it was better now than later.
After a while, I suggested that perhaps the crisis was a good time for him and his wife to get some marriage counseling. I reminded him that 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 languages. He agreed to marriage counseling, and nine months later, Brent and Becky left my office with a reborn marriage. When I saw Brent three years later, he told me what a wonderful marriage he had and thanked me for helping him at a crucial time in his life. He told me the grief over losing the other lover had been gone for more than two years. He smiled and said, “My tank has never been so full, and Becky is the happiest woman you are ever going to meet.”
Fortunately Brent was the benefactor of what I call the disequilibrium of the “in love” experience. That is, almost never do two people fall in love on the same day, and almost never do they fall out of love on the same day. You don’t have to be a social scientist to discover that truth. Just listen to country music. Brent’s lover happened to have fallen out of love at an opportune time.
ACTIONS AND EMOTIONS
During the nine months I counseled Brent and Becky, we worked through numerous conflicts they had never resolved before. But the key to the rebirth of their marriage was discovering each other’s primary love language and choosing to speak it frequently.
“What if the love language of your spouse is something that doesn’t come naturally for you?” I am often asked this question at my marriage seminars, and my answer is, “So?”
My wife’s love language is “Acts of Service.” One of the things I do for her regularly as an act of love is to vacuum the floors. Do you think vacuuming floors comes naturally for me? My mother used to make me vacuum. All through junior high and high school, I couldn’t go play ball on Saturday until I finished vacuuming the entire house. In those days, I said to myself, “When I get out of here, one thing I am not going to do: I am not going to vacuum houses. I’ll get myself a wife to do that.”
But I vacuum our house now, and I vacuum it regularly. And there is only one reason I vacuum our house. Love. You couldn’t pay me enough to vacuum a house, but I do it for love. You see, when an action doesn’t come naturally to you, it’s a greater expression of love. My wife knows that when I vacuum the house, it’s nothing but 100 percent pure, unadulterated love, and I get credit for the whole thing!
Someone says, “But, Dr. Chapman, that’s different. I know my spouse’s love language is physical touch, and I am not a toucher. I never saw my mother and father hug each other. They never hugged me. I am just not a toucher. What am I going to do?”