This book written by Gary Chapman gives guidelines about relationships:specifically about how partners differ in their expression of love .For instance :your partner feels loved and appreciated when you tell her ,you on the other hand, want a gift(no matter how small)to make you feel loved.This is like getting the code to the other persons heart.You now know exactly how the other person will feel and react by making a small gesture from your side.
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| Find And Keep Love When Dating Online. |
The New York Times:
"By BRUCE FEILER
Published: November 19, 2011
I HAD never heard the word “gonads” mentioned from a church pulpit. But on a picnic-perfect afternoon in August, as more than 1,000 people crowded into the Brentwood Hills Church of Christ outside of Nashville, Gary Chapman, a 73-year-old Southern Baptist pastor and author of the mega-selling phenomenon “The Five Love Languages” (7.2 million copies and counting), was talking about what he calls Christianity’s “great sex swindle.”
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Dr. Gary Chapman’s ‘A Growing Marriage’ seminar
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A Love Language of My Own (November 20, 2011)
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“That is the idea that good Christians don’t talk about sex,” he said, “at least not out loud, and certainly not in the church. I want to say that both of those ideas are fallacious. Dr. Ruth did not invent sex. Sex was invented by God.”
For the next hour, the centerpiece of a daylong conference called “The Marriage You’ve Always Wanted,” Dr. Chapman discussed the Bible’s robust support for conjugal sex. He also delivered a pastoral primer on the differing sex drives of men and women. Men, he said, explaining their relentless buildup of sperm cells, are far more driven by physical needs; women, by emotions.
“This explains how a couple can have a knockdown, drag-out fight and 30 minutes later the husband wants to have intercourse,” he said. “Well, ladies, the reason he wants to go to bed with you after the fight is that he wanted to go to bed with you before the fight.”
The audience roared with approval.
Gary Chapman is surely the country’s least likely love guru. At a time when mediagenic marriage counselors crowd the screens with plunging necklines and nonstop Twitter feeds, Dr. Chapman, who last summer celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary, wears khaki trousers, a button-down shirt and a sweater vest. He looks like Mitch McConnell and sounds like Gomer Pyle.
Given his background, it’s no wonder. He was born in China Grove, N.C. (population 2,000). His father, a high school dropout, ran a Shell gasoline station. Dr. Chapman was the first member of his family to go to college, attending Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.
“As a senior in high school, I had a strong sense that God wanted me in some kind of ministry,” he told me. “There were only two things I knew in a Christian framework that I could do. One would be the pastor of a church, the other would be a missionary. I didn’t particularly like snakes, so I decided I should probably be a pastor.”
As a young pastor in Winston-Salem, N.C., he began offering classes on marriage and family, and was stunned by the number of couples who asked if they could stop by his office to chat. “I had the personality that listens and empathizes,” he said.
But he also had the personality that sought out patterns of miscommunication. Combing through dozen of years of notes, he identified different ways that individuals express love. As he explained to the audience near Nashville: “Adults all have a love tank. If you feel loved by your spouse, the whole world is right. If the love tank is empty, the whole world can begin to look dark.”
The problem: individuals fill their tanks in different ways.
To illustrate, he told the crowd a story of a couple on the verge of divorce who came to see him. The man was dumbfounded. He cooked dinner every night for his wife; afterward he washed the dishes and took out the trash. “I don’t know what else do to,” the man said. “But she still tells me she doesn’t feel loved.”
The woman agreed. “He does all those things,” she said. Then she burst into tears. “But Dr. Chapman, we never talk. We haven’t talked in 30 years.”
In Dr. Chapman’s analysis, each one spoke a different love language: he liked to perform acts of service for his wife, while she was seeking quality time from him.
“Each of us has a primary love language,” Dr. Chapman said, and often secondary or tertiary ones. To help identify your language, he recommended focusing on the way you most frequently express love. What you give is often what you crave. Challenges in relationships arise because people tend to be attracted to their opposites, he said. “In a marriage, almost never do a husband and wife have the same language. The key is we have to learn to speak the language of the other person.”
He eventually labeled these different ways of expressing love “the five love languages”: words of affirmation; gifts; acts of service; quality time; and physical touch.
He outlined his ideas, along with some homespun wisdom and a sprinkling of homily, in the book, “The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate,” published in 1992 by Moody, a division of the Bible Institute. It sold 8,500 copies the first year, quadrupling the publisher’s expectation. The following year it sold 17,000; two years later, 137,000.
In a feat of endurance that would make New York publishers swoon, every year (except one) for the last 19 years, the book has outsold its haul for the previous year, putting total sales in North America at that 7.2 million figure; the book has also been translated into 40 languages.
Even more striking, those numbers were achieved without Oprah and without an appearance on a broadcast network. (Though in a rare bit of publicity, Elisabeth Hasselbeck held up the book on “The View” earlier this year and credited it with saving her marriage.)
Dr. Chapman achieved his fame by overcoming yet another obstacle: he’s an outlier in the pop sociology age of Malcolm Gladwell. At a time when many relationship experts ground their advice in academic research, like John Gottman’s “Love” Lab and Deborah Tannen’s linguistics studies, his authority comes from a different place.
While he uses the same sort of codification and conclusiveness as the university set, he is a throwback to a time when advice came from a wise auntie (Dear Abby, Ann Landers) or a town elder (Norman Vincent Peale, Dr. Benjamin Spock).
I asked Dr. Chapman, who holds a Ph.D. in adult education, if he was ever concerned that his views lacked academic underpinnings. “Most people are not going to read an academic book on marriage,” he said. “The normal person wants to know ‘What’s going to help me?’ ”
Inevitably, the book has faced criticism. Some find his tone too preachy. While he openly embraces the mantle of evangelical Christianity, Dr. Chapman points out that the book contains few overt references to Scripture. “I wrote it intentionally so that non-Christians and Christians would read it,” he said.
Others have been put off by a passage in which he encourages a wife to give herself sexually to her husband in a final attempt to reconcile her marriage. “I think the whole concept of submission has been greatly misunderstood in the Christian church,” he told me. “Scripture clearly states that a successful marriage requires both a husband and a wife to have a spirit of submission to each other.”
By his own admission, Dr. Chapman did not set out to be an expert on marriage. His own marriage, to a fellow parishioner, Karolyn, at age 23, was so troubled in its early years that he turned to God in desperation. “If I hadn’t made a covenant,” he said, “I would have left.”
One challenge was that his high-spirited wife, who he later realized valued acts of service, expected her husband to participate in housework; he, needing words of affirmation, wanted to be told how wonderful he was.
They eventually accommodated each other, and he describes their marriage today as being “very loving, very supportive and very caring.” With two grown children and two grandchildren, the couple lives modestly on his preacher’s salary. All the proceeds from his nearly 30 books and video series go to a charity he established to promote Christian values in underprivileged families worldwide.
Curious as to what he might say, I asked Dr. Chapman for the one piece of advice he could give to me and my wife.
“The key to a successful marriage is a growing marriage,” he said. “We are two different people. We are always going to have conflicts. A growing marriage is learning how to respect the other person, see them as a person also made in God’s image. If both of you ask God to help you express your love every day, and give you the wisdom to process your differences, to me you will continue to grow through the years.” "
Although the article is about a growing marriage,I would recommend that you read the "The Five Love Languages" even when you are just dating.As online dating is growing in popularity and you use it to find the love of your life,prepare yourself to meet the right person.By knowing "The Five Love Languages"you will be able to "identify" the love of your life when she/he come across your path.
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