Five Love Languages

Somehow I've inadvertently joined a weekly church group...

It all started when my seriously Christian landlady invited me to a free dinner at one of her churches (she goes to at least two), aimed at young internationals (mostly students). Since I'm now a poor grad student, "free dinner" sounded good to me, so I went. Turned out to be dinner plus some sort of activity, followed by dessert. And the activity isn't directly religious. In fact, other than that we're in a church and someone says grace before the meal, it's not very churchey at all.

So I went again. Yesterday's activity was a lecture about the five love languages, which is actually from a relationships book, but it articulated a lot of stuff I've vaguely thought about for several years now. To summarize, the five languages are: gift-giving, words of affirmation (saying things like "you're awesome!"), acts of service (doing things for the other person), physical touch, and quality time (spending time together while paying attention to each other). Everyone does at least one of these (I suspect two; according to Wikipedia everyone has a primary and secondary), and people in relationships can have trouble understanding each other if they aren't doing the same ones. During the activity part of the activity, when everyone else was working on a 50-question quiz to figure out which one they are, and I didn't have any particular SO to think of them about, I pretty much just read them over and tried to pinpoint what I think all of my friends are. >.>

I'm pretty sure that *I'm* all about quality time as my primary. With bits of acts of service and (possibly weird to people who know me) physical touch thrown in. I don't really do gifts at all, and for at least the first 30 years of my life, I'd always interpreted other people's words of affirmation at me in the same category as empty pleasantries (not so much anymore though).

I can think of several friends in the gift-giving category. One of them just mailed me a care package of socks for my birthday (I requested socks after she made the offer)). Another used to send me postcards and occasion cards regularly before I stopped updating people on my address; she's also super gung ho about gifts to all her nieces and nephews at every occasion.

I can think of several friends in the acts of service category. My former apartment complex mate seemed to like me MORE when I asked him to do random tasks for me while I was out of town, and when I was getting ready to move away. By the time I left, after he ran a ton of errands including get my mother to the airport and clean my rented carpet cleaner for me and let me sleep in his bed while he slept on the couch, he was teary-eyed about me going away. More in the present, my new board game friend here keeps volunteering to help me out with transportation (and is how I'm getting to Blenheim next week to go ebike shopping). I used to think that I should try not to impose too much, but maybe I should ask for more help instead...

Physical touch is a weird one for me. I'm pretty standoffish with the vast majority of people. But if there's someone I really like, I want to hug them as much as possible. The total number of people in the world that I want to touch, and that I'll initiate touching, is just really really small.

Words of affirmation is probably what I most need to work on. They don't mean much to me at all (or at least not in the same way as for everyone else), so it's hard to grok what they might mean to other people. But I should tell people that I think they're awesome more often if I think they're awesome.

Looking at the above two paragraphs, I suspect there are mother issues involved in both of those. Food for thought either way though.