Should Love Be Difficult? Love Languages & Expectations
When it comes to love, there are some people that believe love should be difficult, and some that it should be easy. In this week’s episode we attempt to answer if love should be easy or hard, discussing how to communicate your expectations and how to show love to your partner depending on their love language.
We begin the episode with a segment where we ask our listeners if they think love should be hard, as well as hearing some things they are willing to compromise and things they are absolutely not, as well as what expectations they know they need to have met in a relationship.
We then get into our thoughts on expectations in relationships. We discuss the narrative that’s sold to us in movies about romantic love and if it’s possible to meet someone who miraculously meets all of your expectations and knows how to show you love. We stress the importance of communication and talk about love languages, and if your partner can know and act on your love language without having to ask what it is. Sometimes we don’t have the capacity to show people love in the way their love language requires, and so we talk about what you should do if you have unfulfilled expectations in relationships, and what normal expectations in relationships are.
Ultimately, we believe that your main love language is something you should expect to have met in your relationship. It can be difficult to know whether you have too high expectations in relationships, but that is there is always at least one thing that you need from your partner in order to feel loved, and it’s reasonable to expect that they fulfil that for you! We often make excuses for our partners when it comes to things we’d like them to do but that they won’t, but we want to discuss if love should be hard work and what our limit is when it comes to not having certain needs met in relationships, and when you should walk away.
There is a myth that relationships are hard work, and they can definitely be worth this work, however you shouldn’t put up with not feeling loved or as if your partner isn’t making effort, because you can always find someone who is willing to make that effort to fulfil the things you need!
We love you, and we hope you can all recognise that you are worthy of receiving love in ways that truly make you feel loved. If someone makes you feel like loving you is a chore, it could be time to reconsider the relationships and whether you can find someone who can make you feel a little more loved.
Mentions in this episode include “The Distribution of Chapman’s Love Languages in Couples: An Exploratory Cluster Analysis” (Bland & McQueen, 2018), which you can find here:
https://www.millersville.edu/psychology/files/bland/bland-lovelanguages.pdf. To find out your love language, do a quiz such as this one: https://www.5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/love-language.
