Love Maps

“The more you know and understand about each other, the easier it is to keep connected as life swirls around you.” 

John Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, page 56

http://nationalmarriageseminars.com/about-us/blog/2014/03/10/love-mapping/

A wonderful way to help keep your marriage strong is to create love maps, which are all the detailed bits of information you know about your spouse. Think of it as a bank where you deposit all the things you know about your spouse, so when you want to do something for them, or you want to show them you love them you know just how to do it because you know them.

            Things you store in your love map are things that they like and dislike. Places, things, people, foods, events, sporting teams, favorite times of day/year, treats, colors, etc. Anything that you know about your spouse. If they have something going on in their life you store that information here, so you can give them a text asking how it went, or leave them a sticky note of encouragement where they’ll see it, if you know they’ll like that. Love maps, are the places you store all the things that connect you to your spouse that can help you show them you love in intimate/personal ways, but also in very caring and compassionate ways. If they’re having a bad day, you know having their favorite cozy spot with a glass of their favorite drink is was they’ll need.

            The other night my husband and I went on a date. I was doing my homework on our date, so I was telling him things I appreciated and admired in him, from John Gottman’s first two principles. It was a tad awkward, but in a sweet sappy kind of way. He loves ice cream and as such had picked up a killer deal on some Cold Stone gift cards at Costco, so we went there for a treat. I decided, being me, that I wanted my own “Love it” creation of double Oreo chocolate ice cream. As we sat and talked I devoured my ice cream forgetting all along that while I may love that ice cream, the lactose in it was not going to love me in a couple of hours. The first indicator was my crazy asking for dental floss sleep talking, then my rumbling stomach that awoke me hours later. As I moaned in agony when dawn awoke us I mentioned that my stomach hurt, to which my husband instantly said “Of course it does, you had ice cream last night and you ate almost the entire love it yourself.” To me that was true love, that my husband knew before I even did why my stomach was rolling around and twisting in knots. On his love map, is a spot that’s ingrained that ice cream, as delicious as it may be must only be consumed in small qualities by me or else I will have strange dreams and a grumbly stomach the next morning.

A way to keep your marriage strong is to keep the friendship at the core of your marriage strong. Having respect and valuing each other is very important. You do this by showing fondness and admiration for one another. It may seem fake or not real for some couples to express appreciation for the things the other does in the marriage, but it is very important to express appreciation so that your spouse feels valued. Everyday find something that you see them do that you find admirable and let them know. It doesn’t need to be a big thing. It probably will be something quite small that you notice. Let them know that you notice it. If they do something you find enduring that makes you rather fond of them, let them know. See if a smile will creep across their face. Being told a positive quality in ourselves lifts our spirits and joins people together.

“Fondness and admiration are two of the most crucial elements in a rewarding and long-lasting romance.” Gottman, page 69

If every day you look for and share the things you find your spouse doing that you find admirable and enduring, it will bring you closer together. Each admiration shared is like a stitch on a tapestry. When you’re up close looking you see the individual stitches but not a picture, but when you step back you’ll see how they all work together to create a masterpiece of your life and it will be beautiful.

 “Character and companionship do not come without consistent investment.” H. Wallace Goddard, Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage, page 42

There will be times when you do not feel fondness and admiration for your spouse. That is part of the normal ebb and flow of a marriage. When these times come, and they will come, these are the times that you need to work harder to find the things that you are fond of in your spouse and the things they do that you admire. They are there, but they may take more searching for and they might be smaller in size, but they are never lost if you truly are seeking for them. With consistent investment on both spouse’s part of finding admirable traits and why they are fond of one another they can keep the friendship at the core of their marriage strong.

Tzvetan Todorov, feels: “To care about someone does not mean sacrificing one’s time and energy for that person. It means devoting them to the person and taking joy in doing so; in the end one feels richer for one’s efforts, not poorer.”

I like this quote because I like how it changes in the middle of it. It first starts out making it seem like caring for someone is a chore and a negative thing, but then it turns on itself and shows how caring for another is a privilege that strengthens us. It brings joy, makes us richer, it makes us a better person when we take the time to care for our spouse and do things for them that show we love them.

Every marriage experiences growing pains. If a marriage didn’t experience them, then the marriage would be stagnant, stuck and never growing. Think of a child as they grow taller, their legs ache with the pains of their bones stretching and growing towards the sky. Our marriages are much the same way. They have pains and hard times as they grow through the years. We can either use these times of pain to grow our marriages in healthy ways or we can use these painful times to injure and harden ourselves and ruin our marriages.

C.S. Lewis “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently, He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurt abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of-throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace.”

I think back on our own marriage and the many growing pains that we’ve experienced. We’d had more than our fair share and it seems with our children hitting the teenaged years and my health struggling that they just keep coming. I have wondered many times “why us”, then I remind myself that we are being trusted enough to be learning some wonderful lessons through these growing pains and I turn the “why me” into “why not me?”