I often have people tell me that they don’t feel at all loved by their partner. Yet if I ask the partner, they say that of course they love him or her. So why is this?
Imagine we all have an emotional fuel tank within us. And when our fuel tank runs dry, we need to refill it, in order to keep functioning. And to refuel, we don’t all go to the same gas station. We have preferences.
It’s the same with refilling our own emotional tanks. We have preferences. We don’t all like the same thing, in order to feel topped up!
It has been suggested by Pastor Gary Chapman, who wrote about The Five Love Languages [i], that we all need one or two of the following things from our partner, in order to feel loved and cherished by that person. One way of feeling loved is not better or more correct than another. It is a preference
Have you ever wondered what went wrong? How your relationship got to be so boring and miserable?
Have you got to the point in your relationship where you start to imagine what it would be like to be with someone else? And then you question whether or not you chose the right partner, and perhaps you should have waited a bit longer before getting married?
Sure, you remember starting out with strong feelings for each other – you can remember the chemistry between you, and how you couldn’t keep your hands off each other! But these feelings have waned. Now you often don’t want him to even touch you.
Or perhaps you’ve hit a plateau in your relationship and you’re just ‘housemates’ and can’t seem to get past it. You’re frustrated. Maybe you don’t have sex anymore and you don’t know how or what to do to get started on relationship-building activities to regain the emotional and physical intimacy you shared when you first got together.
This is one of the biggest challenges we see couples struggle with. They want to get back that feeling they had at the beginning of their relationship… that feeling of being connected, of being cherished by their partner. Of being valued and respected and totally absorbed with one another.