Quality Time // The Five Love Languages, Part 2

He thinks he’s doing a great job working hard, paying down the mortgage.  But all she sees is that he never has time for her.  He’s working flat out, she’s feeling unloved and it’s all heading downhill fast.

This week on A Different Perspective we’re looking at how to communicate love between husband and wife. Actually you can apply it to any loving relationship. So often a wife and a husband well, they want to love one another but they just don’t know how. It turns out that all to often they’re talking different languages.

He gives her flowers but all she wants is his attention; she want to spend time with him when he’s dying inside because all he wants her to do is to stroke his cheek. These things are so deep; they’re so buried in our DNA that it even hurts to talk about these needs sometimes.

That’s why this week we’re stepping our way through Gary Chapman’s book, The Five Love Languages. Because it’s not enough for us to want to love our wives or our husbands, we need to know how, and today we’re looking at Quality Time as the second of those five love languages.

Time poor is the trendy expression at the moment. Time poor takes busy and elevates it to, “wow you’re important because you’re time poor.” There are so many things, you know. There’s work, and there’s entertainment, there’s housework, there’s shopping and there’s spending and there’s traveling and there’s the kids. And a lot of it, as we’ve looked at it on previous programs of A Different Perspective is about accumulating stuff.

But stuff doesn’t make us happy. We can go on a flash holiday and get there and still not be happy, you can spend as much money as you like on stuff, but it still wont make us happy because its relationships that bring us that satisfaction: relationship with God, relationship with husband and wife, relationship with family, relationship with friends.

And these days it seems that just keeping our heads above water takes 99% of our time, and the other 1% we’re so exhausted we’ve got no time for relationships, we’ve got no time to give anything.

We’re looking through that great book, and would encourage you to buy the book and read it because it is a really good book, The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. The five love languages that he lists are: words of affirmation, which we looked at yesterday; quality time, which we’re about to look at today; receiving gifts, which we’ll look at tomorrow; acts of service, the next day; and finally on Friday, physical touch.

And it turns out that for each one of us, one or maybe two of those are our primary love languages. In other words we need our wife or our husband, as the case may be, to speak their love into our lives using these languages. If my primary language is physical touch, which it is, then receiving gifts just never works for me. Or words of affirmation, I tell you I don’t need them much, I need my wife to stroke my face and say “I love you” and that’s how I experience her love, by and large.

Sure we need all of those things, but we’re coming down to what’s the primary way in which each one of us experiences love, takes it in. Now when we look today at quality time. Quality time is not about being in the same place together. You can be in the same place with your husband or wife but not have quality time because quality time speaks about attention. It speaks about focus.

A woman can be just yearning to have that undivided attention of her husband and he thinks “Ah I’ll buy her some roses, that’ll do it!” As though some how quality time and roses are equivalent. They are not to someone whose primary way of assimilating love is by spending quality time with her husband.

I’ll let you in on a secret. I am not naturally good at quality time. It is not my primary love language, it is not what I do naturally. I’m a doer, I do stuff, I work hard then I rest, I’m a typical male specimen. I love to withdraw into myself and think and watch sport on television. Time is something that’s there to be managed, I have a diary, I have a to do list.

The first hint, early in our marriage where I knew something wasn’t quite right, was when Jacqui sent “Don’t you ever dare put me into your diary, I never want to see in your diary ‘appointment with wife’!” I thought, “Why not, it seems perfectly logical to me, I have to manage my time. I put my wife in there at 4 o’clock to have a cup of coffee with her.”

It didn’t work for Jacqui, turns out that quality time is one of her two primary love languages, acts of service is the other, we’ll talk about that another day. And for her it means exactly what I just talked about, it means focus, it means conversation, it means attention. And unless she receives my undivided attention she doesn’t feel loved.

Can you see the explosive potential of this, I am outcome oriented, I’m your classic time poor guy who does lots of stuff, and this guy meets this girl who just wants to spend time with him, and his answer is to schedule the time in his diary!!

How do I know if my soul mate needs quality time? How do I know if he or she is someone who really understands my love when I spend quality time with them? Let me ask you, have they ever said to you, “you never spend any time with me, you’re always talking on the phone to other people but not to me.” Chances are that person needs your quality time in order to experience your love.

Email, mobile phones, we’re so connected and available to other people our soul mates miss out. So I’ve had to learn, it’s not been a natural thing for me, I’ve had to say “I married my Jacqui and she needs this and so I have to learn to do this for her.” And here are some of the things that I’ve come up with.

I tend to start pretty early in the morning. I love getting up at 4 o’clock, maybe 5 o’clock at the latest and I start working. And then about 7.30 in the morning when our daughter heads off to school I try and stop, I cant always do it, but I try and stop for 15 minutes, 20 minutes and we have our morning cup of coffee together, and we have a chat.

I’m a morning person, I do my best work in the morning. I love preparing messages and radio programs early in the morning because my mind is sharp at that time. But if I just get up and work and work and work Jacqui doesn’t see me until maybe 4 or 5 in the afternoon. The other thing we do is in the evening, generally after dinner, we go for a walk for half an hour. We hold hands and maybe we talk and maybe we don’t but we just share that time together.

We love renovating and so we’re always talking about ideas and planning and doing this and doing that. It’s fun, it’s our hobby if you like, is renovating houses. And so we enjoy doing it that’s something that we do together, its quality time. And Friday evenings once or twice a month we find a cheap restaurant somewhere and we just go and have a cheap little meal together.
They’re just the things, the very practical things that Berni has had to think about and say, “well Berni, you know you’re not natural at spending quality time with people, so here are the things that you’ve go to learn.” Its not easy, its not perfect but its what my wife needs and what she deserves. And sometimes I make mistakes and sometimes things fall through the cracks, none of us is perfect, but the point is I’ve had to learn.

And we all have to learn when we’re married to someone who experiences love differently to us. We’re always so focused on getting what we need and what we want, the real issue in marriage is figuring what our soul mates needs are, and delighting in meeting those, it’s a sacrifice.

What about your life, what about your marriage? Do you have a spouse who needs words of affirmation, do you have a spouse who needs quality time? What are yours and your soul mate’s primary love language?

To me it is such an exciting thing to explore and to dream and to plan how we can give to our husband or our wife the love that he or she so desperately wants and so richly deserves.