Sex & Sensuality
Pillow Talk
Communicating with the one you love
Most of us grow up learning the language of our parents, which becomes our native tongue. Later we may learn additional languages, but usually with much more effort. In the area of love, it’s similar. Your emotional love language and that of your spouse may be as different as Mandarin from English – no matter how hard you try to express love in English, if your spouse only understands Mandarin, you’ll never understand how to love each other.
Seldom do a husband and wife have the same primary love language. We tend to speak our primary love language and become confused when our spouse doesn’t understand what we’re communicating. Once you identify and learn to speak your spouse’s primary love language, you’ll have discovered the key to a long-lasting, loving marriage. At least that’s how my husband and I went about it.
Now, for full disclosure, I am not a marriage counselor or a sex therapist (except for in my own house). And I am also not in the habit of “should-ing” on people, so this article simply serves as a mechanism to share my truth about loving communication in my marriage for the last 19 years.
In addition, I would like to mention that despite the title, this article is not about sex. It is about communicating with your spouse, lover, beloved mate – and that may very well lead to sex for some of you, but that’s not the entire point of this article. So why did I title it “Pillow Talk?” Well, in our relationship, most of our loving, vulnerable conversations have taken place in our bedroom. Again, we don’t intend for each conversation to lead to lovemaking, but we have frequent pillow talks because we made the decision to make our bedroom a place of safety, honesty and heartfelt self-expression. We have discovered that through a process of being vulnerable, we can reveal what's holding us back from being present to each other.
Now, I do understand that there is a wonderful book that’s been on the market for over a decade that explores and identifies five love languages we use to communicate with our beloveds. I admit that I have not read the book, so I don’t want to reference the title and author. Those who know me, know that I am quick to suggest a good book, but I am just not equipped to recommend this one at this time. Despite all that, I am going to share a few discoveries I’ve made over the last two decades of how Chad (my hubby) and I have learned to speak each other’s language.
by Tracey Keyser