Like every living thing requires love and attention to grow, so will your marriage. If you want a truly lasting relationship with your spouse, both of you will need to be willing to put forth the effort to attend to and nurture your marriage.

In his book The 5 Love Languages, Dr. Gary Chapman explains that every person expresses or feels love in one of five ways: through physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, and/or gifts. We can even feel or give love in a combination of these ways, but in order to avoid discord in our relationships, whether marital or working or parent/child, we must understand how to best show our love, specific to the people we’re communicating with.

In his early career as a marriage counselor, Dr. Chapman noticed that when a client would express a lack of feeling of love coming from their spouse, it was almost always a result of a lack of understand of how each of them felt or received love from the other. Your husband might bring you home flowers every single day, but if your love language isn’t gifts, he may be missing the mark and you might be left feeling overrun with the chores ahead of you at the end of a long day. If he realized your love language was actual acts of service, he might opt to spend some time picking up for you, which would let his love for you be felt so much more deeply on your end.

Some relationships are a little easier, like if your coworker feels love through words of affirmation and that happens to be how you express it. And understanding the love languages might clue you in to why you just can’t seem to get on the same page as your twelve-year-old brother who is just coming into his own. But not everyone, and certainly not every couple, happens to communicate in the same way, so even just talking about the 5 Love Languages can help you understand each other better.

I’d recommend all of my brides (and everyone else!) read The 5 Love Languages to understand how they can better their relationships and improve up existing ones! If you don’t happen to read the book, you can actually take Dr. Chapman’s test online to at least figure out what your love languages are which could be a real eye-opener in your relationship with your fiancé or spouse. Take the test here and let me know what you think!