The Five Love Languages: Acts of Service

Welcome to the final week of our 5 love languages series - today we are wrapping up the month with Acts of Service!

We are going to go deeper in defining what acts of service looks like with your family, friends, and romantic relationships. We are also going to share some of the potential pitfalls to keep in mind if you are in a relationship with an Acts of Service lover!

Acts of Service. My wife's (Jerrod's wife - Illora) number one love language and the one that is dead last for me! This is an excellent example of how many of our relationships end up; two people with completely different ways of communicating and receiving love which will obviously lead to missed opportunities, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings. The good news is that if you can learn the love languages of those around you, you can have the tools to avoid a good number of those situations. The bad news is, none of us is perfect so we will still experience those times more than any of us would like, too.

Just like learning to speak any other foreign language, you are going to be very clumsy with it for a long while before you really start to develop fluency. Even then, there will be occurrences that you have not come across before where you find your love vocabulary needs to grow. For instance, recently my wife and I were discussing ways I could speak her love language better.

I had thought that having certain chore items taken care of, doing them FOR her, before she got home or shortly after, was speaking her love language. Things like doing the dishes, keeping the house mostly together since I primarily work from home and she does not, etc. When I was washing those dishes, I was genuinely thinking, I am doing this because I love my wife. On her end, however, the things I was doing were not the things that communicated love. It took a clear and direct conversation for us both to recognize where our communication was breaking down. Now I know that doing the dishes does not count towards her feeling loved but doing the laundry does!

A few other ways an acts of person might feel loved could be when you do a chore that they hate, when you take care of their responsibilities in order to relieve stress, when you ask them what you could help them with, when you go out of your way in order to make something easier for them.

Now, for some of the pitfalls, some of which i have found from experience. Acts of service people will feel unloved, neglected and hurt when they are left to take care of everything by themselves.

They often find themselves serving others frequently and can feel taken advantage of when their efforts are taken for granted.

Also, acts of service people can become overwhelmed by their perceived expectations of those around them, feeling like they can't meet the needs of those that they care about which, to them feels like they are failing to love them.

Well, this concludes our 5 love languages series and the big thing that we hope you take away is that the 5 Love Languages are primarily meant help us love others well. In your life, you can start to figure out the love languages of those around you in order to serve and love them well.

Next month we have a brand new series on how to build healthier non-romantic relationships. Friends, Family, Classmates and Coworkers are in our lives everyday and these are some of the relationships that can most often be taken for granted.

Finally, we need your help! We have a quick, 1-minute survey that we are asking you to take in order to help us to determine the direction for our future series'. One minute of your time would help us so much and we would definitely appreciate your input! Thank you for joining us today, and we will see you next month!

Survey Monkey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/32TCJNY