The Ultimate Expression of Love

Hopefully Himself will never read this post. He is very modest and absolutely hates it when I brag on him. Which I do regularly because he is a wonderful man and father and all-around human being. (He won't read my Facebook posts about him either.) I figure that if the worst thing I do as his wife is embarrass him because I have so many good things to say about him, he's doing pretty darned well in the grand scheme of things.

A long while ago, a good friend gave me a book called "The Five Love Languages" by a marriage counselor named Gary Chapman. The basic premise of his book is that there are only five major ways that people express and understand love--

1) Words of Affirmation
2) Quality Time
3) Receiving Gifts
4) Acts of Service
5) Physical Touch

--and that understanding which of these is most important in making your significant other feel loved and then doing it is the key to maintaining a long-term, healthy relationship. (I am oversimplifying, but this is the gist.)

The longer I am married, the more this idea resonates with me. For example, I am a card-carrying "Acts of Service" kind of girl. Gifts and words and quality time and touch are all very nice, but the way to my heart is to do something kind for me. Someone who notices that laundry needs to be folded or beds made or dishes washed or recycling taken out (etc, etc) and then takes care of it (without me asking) might as well be screaming "I LOVE YOU" to me. No words needed. It is worth noting that Himself is not an "Acts of Service" kind of guy, meaning that this is not the way he would instinctively choose when trying to express love. However, he knows me well, which brings me to the reason for this meandering post.

I am a gardener. He is not. I like vegetables. He eats only a limited few kinds. He does not have a lot of free time, and the vegetable garden is the absolute last place in which he would ordinarily choose to spend what free time he does have.

However, I have been stressing about the five cubic yards of mulch in my driveway and my lack of time to distribute it in the garden where it needs to go before the weeds take over the universe.

This afternoon, he organized the kids into a bucket brigade and did the heavy shoveling and wheelbarrow-hauling himself and it took the five of us about two hours to do together what would have taken me days by myself in the garden.

If that is not love, I don't know what is.

The message came through loud and clear, and no words were needed.

I love you too, sweetheart.