Physical Touch // The Five Love Languages, Part 5

If only.  If only she’d want to hold my hand still.  If only she’d touch my cheek like she used to.  It’s funny how as we get busier in life, we become less and less intimate in our marriage.

Here’s a cold, hard, statistic – depending of course in which country you live in. Somewhere between 30 and 45% of all marriages end in divorce. In California the registry of births, deaths and marriages is now known as the registry of births, deaths, marriages and divorces.

Is it because people don’t set out wanting to love one another? No! Is it because 30 to 45% of people are so horrible you can’t possibly live with them? No! Is it because people don’t want to grow old together? No! So what exactly is going on here?

My hunch is that one of the biggest issues that leads to divorce is that we just don’t learn how to speak a love language that our wives or our husbands, as the case may be, can understand. This week on A Different Perspective we’ve been just stepping through Gary Chapman’s fantastic book called, "The Five Love Languages".

Last week we went through a series called Having the Marriage you were Meant to Have, because you know something, I believe that marriage is the most amazing gift from God. Jesus said:

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined with his wife and the two shall become one flesh, they are no longer two but one flesh.

Jesus was talking about a blessing of intimacy and companionship, of life long relationship. Okay, marriage isn’t for everyone. Being single or being widowed or being divorced are perfectly reasonable places to be. I’m not saying that everybody has to get married, but most people do.

Last week in that series, "Having the Marriage you were Meant to Have", we laid the foundation stones and if you missed those programs you can listen to them again on our website, www.christianityworks.com this week we’re going through the nitty gritty, the real life stuff. What it means for us to communicate our love in marriage.

We’re different, husbands and wives, in fact we’re all different, and we all speak love and receive love in a slightly different way. That book I was talking about, The Five Love Languages talks about five. Words of Affirmation, the fact that some people the primary way they receive love is through words of encouragement.

Other people for them its Quality Time, for them its just having that time to focus on one another’s husband and wife exclusively with no other distractions, and just talk and be together.

For other people they experience love mostly through Receiving Gifts, it’s just that a gift is a tangible expression of a persons love.
And for others it’s Acts of Service, some people just love serving and those people love to receive love by being served.

And finally today another one, a primary language of love is Physical Touch. Each one of us has one or two of those which predominately we would say is the way that we would like to be loved.

Do we want the others too? Sure we do, but there are one or two for each one of us that we say, “You know something, if my wife doesn’t affirm me and encourage me I don’t feel loved, or if my husband doesn’t give me the odd gift or little bunch of flowers or something I don’t feel loved”.

For me without a shadow of a doubt my primary love language is physical touch. We all need physical touch, it's part of our nurture, I mean, its development as children. You’ve probably seen the experiments with primates where they isolated the young chimp at the beginning of its life and it receives no touch. And that chimp grows up to be incredibly maladjusted and violent and can’t live in a social context with other chimps.

Sadly, we see that in people too who haven’t received that nurture that you get uniquely from being touched by your parents and family. But I’m not talking about the general needs, I’m not talking about sex even. I’m talking about the specific need that some people have for a primary love language of touch. The gentle touch that says uniquely, “I love you.”

Now it’s hard for me to come to grips with the fact that my primary love language is physical touch. I grew up being a hard nosed businessman and I’m definitely not your touchy, touchy, kissy, kissy, sort of person. You know how some people meet you and they want to give you a big kiss and a hug. And my godmother used to do that when I was a kid, God bless her, and she’d leave this big thing of lipstick on my cheek. And I can remember thinking, “Oh yuck! That is not me.”

And yet when it comes to my wife Jacqui whose primary love languages are acts of service and quality time, she can do those things to me until she’s blue in the face, but unless she holds my hand or strokes my cheek or puts herself close to me I simply don’t feel loved. Why? I don’t know, it’s just the way that God made me. And people who know me in ministry or in business would say, “You’ve got to be kidding, Berni, touch, no, no way!”

It’s not always self evident. In fact a lot of people, especially men, probably wouldn’t even be aware that their primary love language, the way that they really want to experience love, is through the medium of physical touch.

If you’re someone who doesn’t feel loved, ask yourself this question, “How much difference would it make if your wife or your husband, whatever the case maybe, touched you more often?” You might be surprised at the answer.

There’s a beautiful picture in Mark’s Gospel Chapter 1 verse 40, if you have a Bible, of a man who was a leper. Now in the first century lepers suffered social isolation. They couldn’t go near people who didn’t have leprosy. If someone who didn’t have leprosy came close to them within 60 or 70 feet they had to yell out “Unclean! Unclean!” They couldn’t go to the synagogue with the other people, they couldn’t even live in the city walls with the other people, they had to live on the rubbish dump outside the city walls.

And this leper comes to Jesus and says “Lord, lord, if you are willing you can make me clean,” because he’d seen Jesus heal other people. And Mark records it this way, he says:

Jesus was moved with compassion and He reached out and He touched the leper, and He said, ‘I am willing, be made clean.’

Isn’t that awesome! The law forbade lepers from touching people who weren’t lepers, and when this leper comes to Jesus and asks for healing, the compassion in Jesus’ heart causes him to reach out and to touch the untouchable.

What do you think that communicated to the leper? Maybe the lepers primary love language was touch, I don’t know, we will never know that. But what an awesome picture of God the Son reaching out and touching the untouchable.

If God can touch the leper, if God can do that, why is it that if we have a wife or a husband who wants to receive touch, what is it in us that doesn’t do that? It costs nothing to touch yet it so beautifully expresses love in a marriage, the intimacy, the kindness the gentleness of physical touch.

This week we’ve looked at five different languages of love, words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch. Can I encourage you to figure out which one or two of those are your primary love language and your soul mate’s primary love language and then the two of you sit down and talk about it, explore it.

What is it that each of you need? You know we so often don’t talk about that in a marriage. We get angry with each other, we get frustrated with each other but we don’t talk about it. And when you figure out that your wife or your husband has a different way of receiving love from you let me tell you its going to be unnatural to give love that way.

So it has to be planned, it has to be deliberate, it has to be learned, it has to be sacrificial. It’ll be hard some days and it’ll be inconvenient some days but the fruit of loving your wife or your husband in the way that they want and they need is the most wonderful blessing from God in marriage.