If you learn the technique I’m introducing today, I believe the problems during the adjustment period won’t be a problem anymore.

After being in a relationship for a long time, you may start feeling like your partner doesn’t love you as much as before.

This is understandable. After the honeymoon phase, when you enter the adjustment period, the “filters” you both used to see each other are removed, and all the embellishments are gone. The flaws that were previously overlooked become apparent.

The adjustment period is very painful, and many once loyal relationships have fallen apart during this time.

However, the adjustment period is a necessary stage in every long-term relationship, albeit the duration varies. Only the love that has been tested during the adjustment period has the potential to “last forever.”

So, how can we safely navigate the adjustment period and make our relationship more stable?

What problems usually arise during the adjustment period?

To know the solution to the problem, you first need to know what problems need to be solved.

The adjustment period often brings up these issues:

Why don’t you listen to me?
Why do you treat me like this?
Why am I so good to you, but you don’t appreciate it?
Why don’t you understand me? I’m doing this for your own good.
…

In summary, these problems can be divided into two categories:

▲ Misunderstandings about each other’s behavior.
▲ Complaints about not being understood by each other.

In other words, you’re expressing love in different ways, but neither of you acknowledges the other’s way of expressing love.

How should I express love?

There are about 5 ways people express love:

▲ Verbal compliments (such as affirmations, agreement, encouragement, and praise)
▲ Physical closeness (including holding hands, kissing, and sexual activities)
▲ Acts of service (all kinds of services for the other, including cleaning, cooking, and doing the dishes)
▲ Quality time (activities together, giving each other undivided attention)
▲ Receiving gifts (giving gifts, whether self-made or bought)

These 5 ways of expressing love are called “love languages,” coined by the famous marriage counselor Gary Chapman. Each person only feels loved when they “hear” their own love language.

If your partner doesn’t use your preferred love language for a long time, you may experience a “lack of love” and feel that your partner doesn’t love you.

If you often complain that your partner doesn’t do household chores, and you express love by doing chores, then your “love language” is likely “acts of service.”

If your partner’s love language is “verbal compliments,” she may praise you for doing the chores well, but may not actually do them. However, in your eyes, your partner is someone who only likes to talk and never makes actual efforts. Over time, these conflicts accumulate between the two of you.

If you can put yourself in your partner’s shoes, the reason you often feel that your partner doesn’t understand your feelings and efforts is because your partner can’t understand your love language. To her, your way of expressing love is like a foreign language.

So, instead of trying to make your partner adapt to your love language, it’s better to get used to expressing love in your partner’s love language. If you feel your needs are not being met, you can communicate with your partner and express your desire for how you want to be treated. When your partner feels your love, she will be more willing to use your love language to reciprocate, to show her love to you.

How do you express love in a moving way?

Meeting a partner with the same love language as you is very lucky, but we can’t rely on this luck. People are very complex, and each person may have unique love languages in addition to the five common ones.

For example, my own love languages are “acts of service” and “verbal compliments,” with a higher proportion of compliments. There may also be some love language forms that I haven’t discovered yet.

So, how can we understand each other’s love languages? And how can we understand our own love languages?

▲ Record the aspects you usually complain about yourself, and your dissatisfaction with each other. Often, this is the love language you lack.

▲ Think about each other’s requests and expectations, which is also where love languages are concentrated.

▲ You can focus on using one love language for a week to express love, and judge which love language is more suitable for your partner based on her emotions, expressions, and attitude changes.

For Love, Sometimes You Need to Endure Some Hardship

There’s another situation. What if it’s very difficult for you to learn your partner’s love language?

For example, you hate spending time at useless gatherings and would rather express your love by buying expensive gifts. If your partner’s love language is “receiving gifts,” she may be very happy, but if her love language is “quality time,” your relationship will eventually run into problems.

At this point, it’s time for you to make a choice. If you feel you can’t stand wasting your time and believe that maintaining your way of doing things is more important than your partner’s feelings, then your approach is naturally justifiable. But if you truly love your partner and want to repair the relationship with her, no matter how uncomfortable this situation makes you, you need to step out of your comfort zone and make time for her, even if you are busy.

The proponent of this theory, Gary Chapman, once shared a story about himself:

He was forced to do household chores by his mother since he was a child. In high school, if he didn’t clean the entire house every week, he couldn’t go out to play. So, he hated doing housework. In high school, he secretly vowed never to do housework again and to make his future wife do it.

However, after getting married, he still often did the housework, and even more than before. He discovered that his wife’s love language was “acts of service.” Therefore, to express love to his wife, he voluntarily did something he used to detest.

He told this story to his wife like a tale, and she realized that all his cleaning was based on his pure love for her, and suddenly felt filled with love.

Don’t think that you’re sacrificing something for love. Take exercise, for example. No one likes the hard work of lifting weights, nor the muscle soreness that lasts for several days afterward. But you know that after that, your body shape, mental state, and overall health will greatly improve. These uncomfortable experiences will also captivate you.

Expressing love in a way you don’t like may be very difficult at first, but as long as you try a few times and see your partner, who used to be less willing to love you, become more willing to love you, and your need for love is continually satisfied, the expression that used to make you miserable will become skilled and effortless.

For me, learning and understanding love languages is more like a way of getting to know myself and putting oneself in others’ shoes. The former allows for a more comprehensive understanding of oneself, and lets us know what ways can please ourselves, while the latter will raise our emotional intelligence. Not only will it make others happy, but the positive feedback we receive will also make us happier.

The source of most negative emotions in life comes from not understanding ourselves and others. You may think that understanding irrelevant people is a waste of time, but what if the person you need to understand is your lifelong partner?

Learning love languages has become an essential skill for deciding the quality of your life in the second half of your life.

If you’re currently in a long-term relationship and struggling with how to maintain it, you might as well try expressing love in your partner’s love language.