The Importance of Knowing Your Love Languages
For those who might not know, love languages are the different ways that people enjoy giving and receiving love. The main five that people show varying levels of desire for are physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, and receiving gifts. While most people want at least a little bit of all five of these, being aware of which are most important to you can change the way you interact with others both romantically and platonically. Click here if you want to take the test yourself to see where you rank.
It’s also important to note that your strongest love language for how you prefer to receive love might differ from how you prefer to give love. Being aware of your own love language preferences as well as those of your friends and loved ones can change the ways you show appreciation for each other and strengthen your relationships. My top love language is quality time, and that has become really important to me since graduating from college.
Especially for my friends who have moved to different states since graduating, I wanted to make sure that I still found ways to spend quality time with them despite not being able to see them in person anymore. To me quality time is spending time either one on one or in a small group and genuinely catching up and seeing how the other person is doing. This can involve a fun activity or something to do, but it can also be as simple as meeting up somewhere to just sit and talk.
The struggle of entering “adult life” is realizing how busy everyone is and that we’re all on different schedules, so suddenly I had several friends who all wanted to catch up sometime but we never knew when that sometime would be. I was at a bit of a loss for what to do to catch up with them, and it didn’t feel like anyone was doing anything wrong or trying to avoid each other. That’s when my Mom suggested I design a little invitation to facetime and send it out to my friends as a way to try and set a time and date to talk then and there instead of just saying we should sometime in the future.
I made this cute little graphic on Canva and sent it out to some of my friends, and I’m happy to say I feel like I’m working my way back to getting the quality time I crave with some of my friends who are farther away now. While it hasn’t been perfect and schedules are still tricky to work with sometimes, I’m glad that I made this effort to reach out to people and I’m hoping to schedule more FaceTime catch ups with my friends soon.
If I wasn’t aware of how important quality time was to me, I’m not sure that I would have done this. Thanks to what I know about myself through love languages, I’ve been able to stay connected with my friends no matter where they are or if it’s in person or on my computer.