By Mojisola Josephine Kuwadinu:
Coping With The Crisis Stage In A Relationship
Love is the most wonderful emotion ever to exist. Everyone wants to be loved or feel loved.
But contrary to popular opinion, love isn’t an emotion nor a feeling.
Love is an act. Love is deliberate.
Most times, what we describe as love is the in-love feeling we have when we meet someone new. The euphoric feeling we get, we term it as love.
In every relationships, there are four stages: the euphoric stage, the early attachment stage, the crises stage and the commitment stage.
The in-love feeling can only get us as far as the early attachment stage. Now, how do we cope with the crises stage when we’ve believed that just being in love is enough for a lasting relationship.
This brings me back to my earlier statement that love is an act and it’s deliberate.
We have to consciously keep the fire of love burning. How do we do this?
Love is better received when it’s expressed in a language the receiver understands.
Gary Chapman in his book “5 love languages” wrote about the importance of expressing love in a language the partner understands.
The languages goes thus:
Quality time
Acts of service
Receiving gifts
Physical touch
Words of affirmation
For love to stand the test of time, one has to deliberately express it in the language of one’s partner.
It is also advisable for couples to study each other well enough to determine the other person’s love language.
How?
When a relationship gets to a crises stage, note what the other partner complains of the most.
When a partner starts to say “you don’t help me around the house anymore. All you do is press your phone or read a book”, that’s an indication that their love language is “acts of service.
Or when one complains about the other partner not being available anymore, then quality time needs to be considered as the person’s love language.
Remember, what they complain about will serve as an indication as to what their love languages are.
Mojisola Josephine Kuwadinu