You’re probably thinking, how can love have a language?

Yes-love is a universal language and there are a multitude of ways to show someone you love them but that’s exactly where most of us fail.

Pretend you’re holding an old bucket full of flower petals. The petals are pink, red and white and you love how they make you feel when you look at their simple beauty.

Now pretend your significant other (or friend or family member) walks up to your bucket and starts taking handfuls of those flower petals and putting them in their own bucket. At first you don’t mind because you love them and you don’t mind sacrificing something that makes you feel good so that they too can feel good.

Suddenly you notice that your bucket only has a handful of flower petals left in it. The rust on the bottom of the bucket is starting to show and you realize that this bucket isn’t much without the beauty of all of the petals. To your dismay-your significant other takes every single last flower petal and leaves you standing there holding on to a dirty old bucket.

When you ask your partner to give some of your petals back so that you BOTH can enjoy their beauty, instead of handing you the petals that they originally took from you they hand you back a different kind. These petals aren’t nearly as beautiful as the ones you had and it immediately makes you feel like your partner is just taking from you and not appreciating what you are giving.

This is where the five love languages can save your relationship with a significant other, family member, or friend.

Do you see what’s actually happening? In your eyes your partner is just consistently taking from you and never giving back but in reality they feel the exact same way.

In their eyes, they are taking your petals and replacing them with better ones because your partner happens to like their petals more than yours. To them, they are helping you. They are providing for you and they are giving from their bucket to yours to make you happy.

It’s all a simple miscommunication.

Relationships tend to go downhill when we forget to talk to one another in a language that we each understand.

Take a look at the five love languages:

Words of Affirmation

Physical Touch

Quality Time

Acts Of Service

Receiving Gifts

For you, the equivalent of the beautiful petals filling your bucket is your partner telling you everyday how much they love you, are attracted to you, and appreciate you (words of affirmation).

For your partner, the equivalent of their bucket being filled with petals is when both of you get to spend a Saturday together watching movies and hanging out around the house (quality time).

When you try to fill your partners love bucket with words of affirmation (since that’s what you believe to be the best way to show another you love them) they feel as if you are just taking all of their flower petals and not giving any back.

When your partner spend all Saturday with you but never tells you how much they’re enjoying themselves (since just spending time together is enough for them to feel loved and cared for) you feel as if you’re giving away all of this time to someone who doesn’t appreciate your presence.

Our relationships fail when you lose sight of how to fill our partners bucket. They feel unloved and we feel unloved and it’s an all around losing situation.

Find out your love language and have your partner do the same and use this as a guide to making sure that each of you are speaking to each other in the same language and filling each other’s buckets with flower petals best suited for them.