Married or just live together? White dress or colored dress? Sleeves or no sleeves? Where will we live? Who will work? Will we both work? Pets or no pets? Apartment or house? Kids or no kids? When should we start having kids? Etc. etc.
The list of questions requiring answers could go on forever when dealing with taking a relationship to the next level. As your relationship develops and you start having kids the amount of decisions only get more involved and more wanting of you. This week I learned that it is crucial to our relationships, married or not, to work on understanding each other.
In John Gottman’s Book, “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage work” he described what he calls love maps. A love map is Gottman’s term for “the part of your brain where you store all the relevant information about your partner’s life.” (Gottman, J.) He compares the bilblical term for sexual love is to “know” and shows that this love map is how we do this.
In his book, Gottman gives us various activities to help us understand our love map. Together with my spouse we have completed a few of these tasks. As we recently exited the dating stage and moved on to dating we are pretty familiar with the ins and outs of each other’s lives. The activities didn’t strike us as too involved.
Once we moved into chapter 5, “Principle 2: Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration” we felt our love develop a little further as we completed, the “I appreciate” activity and “Cherishing Your Partner”. (Gottman, J) With a hectic week we had to set aside specific time for both of these. In doing so the time was set apart from any distractions and really made the experience special. These activities helped us to remember how important we are to one another and to just feel the love that we have for one another.
While we completed the “I Appreciate” activity, it was just as Gottman described in his Love Lab, “Couples who began the session sitting stiffly and awkwardly suddenly relax. The room fills with laughter.” As my husband and I began going through these we sat together looking at my Ipad trying to determine which five were appropriate for us. We started with some funny ones like, “Thanks for being such a great mom.” We have no children or even pets for that matter. We joked about it a bit as I complemented him taking the kids to the pediatrician. We laughed and it became silly for a while as we read through the ones that didn’t really apply to us but we acted as if they were real complements. Once we began the conversation of ones that really applied we nestled into each other and settled there. We showed our appreciation with our words but our body language changed as the conversation became more personal. We were able to feel the admiration of one another through the words yes, but also through the way we were able to connect physically.
The “Cherishing Your Partner” (Gottman, J) activity was much of the same. As we individually wrote the list and thought “I am really lucky to be with my partner.” I realized how I could not be accomplishing the many things I am without his love and support. It just would not be possible. The list of ten traits quickly became a letter of way more than that. Thinking positive thoughts about your spouse truly leads to a deeper appreciation for them. As we read our letters to each other it was a special moment where what we perceived as weakness were recognized strengths by the other. Through completing this activity we learned how important it is to recognize the appreciation we have for one another in order to support each other’s efforts to become better people.
References:
Gottman, J. M. (Ed.). (2015). The seven principles for making marriage work (2nd ed.). New York: Three Rivers Press.
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