Receiving Gifts // The Five Love Languages, Part 3

That Neil Diamond song “You Don’t Send me Flowers Anymore” says it all in some marriages.  What happened to those unexpected gifts?  What happened to the love?

This week on A Different Perspective we’re taking a look at how to express our heartfelt commitment to our soul mates, our wives, or our husbands as the case may be. Imagine; boy meets girl, she only speaks Swahili, he only speaks Japanese, they get married but they still can’t speak one another’s languages, what sort of a marriage are they going to have?

Well there are two options; they either decide to learn one another’s languages or things are going to fall apart because unless they learn to communicate, the frustration and the isolation would just tear them apart. That’s how it is with different languages and love.

Gary Chapman’s written a great book called The Five Love Languages, the last couple of days we’ve looked at the first two of those, Words of Affirmation and Quality Time, today we’re going to look at the third, Receiving Gifts.

Anthropologists are a funny lot, they love to study human patterns of behaviour across different cultures, and in fact right down through history. And they look for common themes and patterns of behaviour. One of the most basic, one that appears in every culture is the notion that love is about giving.

My hunch is that in the garden of Eden Adam used to go out looking for flowers for Eve and pick them, and give them to her, no doubt, and we know for a fact that she loved picking fruit for him to eat! Well I guess no one’s perfect! So over the last few days we’ve looked at the first few languages of love that Chapman talks about in his book, The Five Love Languages.

The first was Words of Affirmation. Some people’s primary way of experiencing love is through words that other people say to them that affirm them. So a man who needs words of affirmation will need his wife to say, “Darling you look great in that suit. Darling, thank you so much for doing that.” And a woman who needs words of affirmation will need exactly the same thing from her husband.

The second of those was Quality Time. It’s a happy buzz phrase isn’t it? But quality time is more than just sitting in front of the box and just being in a safe space together. Quality time is focusing our attention exclusively on one another, and there are some people whose primary way of receiving love is through the knowledge that their husband or wife spends quality time with them.

The third one, which is the one that we’re going to look at today, is Receiving Gifts.

Now a gift, I used to think, “Well how can someone experience love by receiving gifts, isn’t that kind of tacky and cheap and materialistic?” Truly that’s what I used to think. But when you think about it, a gift is something tangible. You can hold it in your hand, you can look at it and say “he loves me”, or “wow she loves me” and you’ll look at it again, and again, and again.

It’s a tangible tactile physical expression of the giving part about love, that thing that anthropologists discover is common to every culture that they’ve analysed. It’s a symbol of a thought. We’ve heard the saying, “it’s the thought that counts.”

It’s not the actual gift, it’s not how much it cost, it’s the fact that the gift represents something and it represents love, or friendship, or whatever. So this visual symbol of love is more important to some people than it is to other people.

Let me tell you about Berni. A gift to me will fail to express your love or your friendship to me precisely 100% of the time. If I never receive another gift in my life it’ll be too soon. If nobody ever remembers my birthday again in my life it’ll be too soon. When we were first married, Jacqui and I, Jacqui thought, “Ah I’ll go and buy my husband a tie, or clothes, or aftershave,” and I was absolutely horrified.

I buy my own ties, I buy my own clothes, I buy my own aftershave. And Mum, my last birthday, she said “Berni what would you like for your birthday?” And I said “Truly Mum, give the money to charity, I just don’t want a gift”. So actually she gave a donation to the ministry of Christianityworks.

For me gifts simply don’t say I love you. Yet Melissa, our daughter, it’s one of her two primary languages of love. Gifts are really important to her. When I went to India last year, she loves silver, and so I saw an Indian silver necklace and earrings, and I bought that for her.

And at night time my wife Jacqui and I go for walks and we walked past this store that has this beautiful silver beaten jewellery and I’m always thinking and planning, “now I wonder which one of those I can get for Melissa’s birthday”.

And just recently, last Christmas, one of the things that teenagers in her age group in her culture, all want, is they want an iPod, right, that’s what’s happening amongst young people today, she’s 15. And so we saved up our money and bought her an iPod Nano. And on the back, if you buy them online on the Internet, they’ll actually inscribe whatever you ask them to inscribe, machine inscribed, beautifully done. And so we had it inscribed on there ‘Melissa Dymet loved, cherished and adored’. And that spoke volumes to her because receiving gifts is one of her primary love languages.

The other morning I was out for a walk and she’d gone the bus stop waiting for her school bus and the frangipani’s were out,(they’re my favourite flower, they smell so nice) and I thought “you know when I come around the corner I bet you she’s still at the bus stop”. So I picked up just one frangipani flower that had fallen down and I walked up to her at the bus stop and I said, “Here, this is for you”. Just the one flower. Well, her face just lit up because receiving gifts is one of her primary languages of love.

King Solomon, in Proverbs Chapter 18 verse 16, way, way back when King Solomon was alive he wrote this

A gift opens the way for the giver and ushers him into the presence of the great.

You see gifts to people for whom receiving gifts is their primary love language, gifts open the door into their hearts. Things are just things to me. Possessions are just servants they’re nothing more. I’m not sentimental about those things.

But I’ll tell you one gift, the one physical thing that I possess that I prize above all things is my wedding ring because it’s a symbol of my wife’s love for me. And I could be starving and have no money, I still would not sell this wedding ring. So even for the most hardened anti-gift person I have my price, you know what I mean?

Now when I used to think that gifts and giving were a bit superficial and a bit materialistic. Actually the symbolism of the gift is how some people experience and receive love. Have you ever heard a wife say, “He never brings me flowers anymore.” Now think about it, flowers die in a few days but they are a symbol of romantic love.

Gifts can be purchased, gifts can be found, gifts can be made. “Oh but I’m not a gift giver.” Congratulations, welcome to marriage. This is a lesson of love; we need to learn to give love in a way that our husband or wife can accept love. And if your soul mate receives love through the receiving of gifts, it is time for you to make a list of all the things that seem to push their buttons and we don’t have to wait for special occasions.

We don’t have to wait for birthdays, or Christmases, or anniversaries because for someone who receives gifts as love, just the little things, just the little frangipani flower that you pick up on the spur of the moment that you find on the street, can say I love you. And when you receive a gift from such a person, like my daughter Melissa did a painting at school and she brought it home and she gave it to me, that gift, that painting has pride and place in my study because when she gives me a gift she is saying something that goes beyond what I may interpret the gift to be.

We do all the other things, we can work, provide, clean, cook, make love, everything but if you’re soul mate’s primary love language is receiving gifts and you don’t give them gifts, they will feel like their marriage is dead.