So now that we’ve established that everyone has a different idea of what it means to love, these activities will help you and your partner define love with each other.
What is love? The dictionary version
The definitions of love, according to the American Heritage Dictionary:
- A deep, tender feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship or a sense of oneness.
- A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance.
- Sexual passion or intercourse.
- An intense emotional attachment, as for a pet or treasured object.
- A person who is the object of deep or intense affection or attraction; beloved.
- An expression of one’s affection.
- A strong predilection or enthusiasm for a person or object.
Determining your partner’s love style
Love is so much more nuanced and complex than the dictionary definitions, especially when it comes to the way love is expressed, as just talked about in our discussions of the different love styles. (If you just landed on this page, you might want to go back and read about the different love scripts, which are linked on the left side of this article.)
The exercises and surveys below will help you and your partner come to a better understanding of each others style of expressing love so that you can keep these loving feelings alive. Pick and choose which exercises you’d like to do or complete all three.
The love style survey
This is a simple one page survey that you and your partner fill out. It’s designed to be a quick way to help each other learn more about what makes the other person tick. Opens as a printable PDF.
Determining your love language questionnaire
This is a more detailed checklist that you can use either alone or with your partner in order to get a better understanding of your own love style. Many couples find it helpful to complete this first before going on to complete the love style survey.
The love definition exercise
Using a blank piece of paper, create a definition of love according to what components are most important to your own concept of love. Use the key concepts of your choice from the list below, elaborating on why this component is so important to you and what, precisely, it means. The following keywords are merely designed to spur your mind into thought in order to make this task a little bit easier. Feel free to come up with your own terms.
- Fulfillment
- Listening
- Security
- Nonjudgmental
- Sex
- Loyalty
- Happiness
- Commitment
- Gratification
- Affection
- Reliable
- Sharing
- Sacrifice
- Understanding
- Selfless
Pick the top five or ten items from your list that you feel are most important, and then write a sentence or two on each one, detailing what it means to you. Then share these definitions with each other.