Your Better Self with Akanna: So, This is My Love Language

Last week, I told you that my girlfriend and I both started the year off reading The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman.  It was our book for the month of January as we sought to understand each other better, and learn to speak each other’s love languages.

Before reading the book though, we both took the Love Language Profile for Couples online, individually.  The purpose was to try to figure out what our primary love languages were, even though we hadn’t read the book yet.

It came out that she had 3 primary love languages: Acts of Service, Physical Touch and Quality Time; scoring 7 in each of those, out of 12.

You can imagine how daunting that looked to me.  I mean, the main purpose here was to find out the one primary love language that we could focus on, and pay the most attention to, while speaking the rest every once in a while.  Now, it was looking like I had to focus on 3. Three out of five!

Well, mine came out as Words of Affirmation.  I scored a very high eleven out of twelve there.  The rest were: Receiving Gifts (8/12), Acts of Service (6/12), Quality Time (4/12) and then Physical Touch (1/12).

Now it was looking more daunting.  Her top 3 were my last 3! How was this relationship supposed to work?

It turns out we were a little misguided.  That’s why education is very important, self-education most especially.  We both read the book and, after we spent the whole of January reading and discussing it together, we took the Profile again.  This time, it was the one at the back of the book itself.  It had one Profile for “him” and another for “her”.

Now, with a better understanding of who we were – after studying – her results were different.  Her numbers changed.  She scored 9/12 for Quality Time, and it turns out that’s her primary love language, followed closely by Physical Touch (8/12), Receiving Gifts (5/12), Words of Affirmation (4/12) and then Acts of Service (3/12).

Mine did not change much.  Words of Affirmation was still my number one, also with an eleven out of twelve.  Both Receiving Gifts and Acts of Service came in second with a score of 7/12 each.  Then Quality Time (4/12) and Physical Touch (1/12) just like before.
So, here we are.  Now we know our primary love languages, but there’s still a little bit of a problem and that’s why I’ve written this article today.

I need your suggestions.

As you can see, our primary love languages are wildly different.  The only relief after reading the book and taking the test again was  that, for her, Receiving Gifts became more important – her top 3.  And since giving and receiving gifts come naturally to me, it was a relief to me!

But her top 2 do not come naturally to me.  She likes Quality Time the most and I like spending time alone: reading, writing, taking walks, napping.  She likes Physical touch next and, for me, that’s my least. I scored only 1/12 there.  I guess someone who likes some quiet time – being mostly by himself –wouldn’t like to be physically touched a lot.

To make matters a little bit more difficult, we are long distance!  So, how do I even try to practice spending Quality Time together and Physical Touch?

How do I speak her primary love languages to her when the combination of both my natural tendencies and the distance between us makes it such a challenge?

It’s easier for her to speak mine over the phone to me –literally. Words of Affirmation, and she does it so well!  It’s now left to me to figure out how to make speaking her love languages to her easier for me to do.

So, what do you suggest? How should we go about making the most of our relationship in light of this new discovery and the situations around it?

I would love to know your thoughts on this.  I’m hoping that I’d learn a whole lot from my readers this time!