DATE NIGHT By Mike Gervais
LANGUAGE LESSONS
T
his month, Kat and I embarked on a date that had us plan and prepare for a… different date.
Let’s back up. Our Date Nights come from a book that gives us a vague idea what we’ll be getting into. This month, I narrowed it down to two options, and we flipped a coin to decide what we’d be doing. Tails meant that we would each go online to take a quiz that would tell
us our “love language,” a breakdown of how we prefer to express and experience our love for one another. The five love languages are quality time, acts of service, words of affirmation, physical touch and receiving gifts. Once we completed the quiz, Kat and I were tasked with sharing examples of how the other can speak to us in our preferred love language to better express our feelings for each other.
When it comes to expressing our affection in our partner’s preferred love language, we both felt like we do a decent job of communicating. Kat said simple things like holding hands, or putting my arm around her, makes her happy. For me, I am not sure Kat and I could spend any more quality time together. We do virtually everything, from shopping to relaxing together, and I love it. The next step in our love language date was to plan a date that would focus on our preferred love languages. For a couple that has been enjoying monthly date nights via a subscription box, creating our own evening from scratch was a challenge. Our mission, a date with a focus on spending quality time together (easy) and incorporate physical tough (hmmm?). We can cuddle and watch a movie. But we do that at least once a week anyway. (See, we’re good at this relationship stuff).
Learning our love language from an online quiz was a new experience for both of us. While I rely on spending quality time with Kat to express my love and feel love, Kat depends more on physical touch, such as holding hands, or a kiss goodnight, to feel and express love.
Our love language test revealed that my preferred method of receiving affection is spending quality time together. Kat’s preferred love language – physical touch – was not a surprise.
We were so stumped on ideas for our big date night that Kat retrieved the calendar we created during our February date night that had us create a schedule for romantic activities. It was gratifying to see that we’ve already done about half the dates that we scheduled, but a little frustrating to find that there weren’t
ConnectionMO.com | Connection Magazine | 37
