Are Books a Part of Your Love Language?
As I was growing up in a large family with six kids, my parents struggled to keep up with our lives. They had to work to put food on the table, to do the laundry (for eight people! every week!), the grocery shopping, the cooking, and the cleaning. They also helped us with homework, undertook to discipline us as needed, and to impart important life lessons. None of this left much time in their sixteen-hour days for a great deal of individualized attention for their brood.
And yet, we knew we were loved.
Recently my son and daughter-in-law told me about “love languages.” They encouraged me to go online to find out what mine was. In this article in The Atlantic Magazine, Ashley Fetters describes the concept this way:
“The idea that there are five distinct “love languages” may be as familiar to some people today as the idea that there are seven continents, four seasons, or three Stooges…The author, Gary Chapman, based his theory that everyone has a primary love language (that is, a category of behaviors that they most immediately associate with affection) on his own observations as a counselor. Enumerated in the book and now well known to millions, the five love languages are quality time, physical touch, acts of service, giving and receiving gifts, and words of affirmation.”
When I took the quiz, I learned my love language is “Receiving Gifts.” This came as no huge surprise. I love giving gifts to the people I love, and I also love getting them.
(If you haven’t taken the Love Language quiz yet, you can do so here.)
Growing up in that loud rowdy family, I think there was another love language at work that was not recognized in the quiz.
In our family, we all loved stories and we loved books. When we were younger, our parents read to us as we nestled into their sides for our favorite time of the day. My mother, a librarian by training, arranged with the local library to have the bookmobile stop in front of our house every Wednesday. We were allowed to take out 5 books each week…and we all did.
At dinner every night, we children competed with each other to tell stories from our days and sometimes those stories grew in grandiosity as the meal went on. On Sunday evenings, my father would sit in his easy chair in the family room while we children fanned out on the floor around him and he read to us from Robinson Crusoe and other family classics.
As we got older and preferred reading on our own, every night before bed you would find all of us in one room or another reading our library books until lights out.
I started reading to my son when he was a few months old. Each night I would tuck him into my bed for our nightly ritual of stories. It was my favorite time of the day. I was profoundly sad when he announced at a young age that he was now old enough to read to himself.
Love can be expressed in many ways. In our family, reading and sharing stories was one of them.
Have you ever read a book and thought, “I could write a story as good as this?” Did you then tuck away that thought for a time when life would be less busy so you could turn your attention to writing?
Do you have stories you want to share about your family history or your life journey? Do you want to preserve your family’s story? Do you want to share your journey with others in the hopes that your experiences, successes, and failures may help some of them?
Women have faced unfair obstacles in the publishing industry for many years. It’s why I started Bold Story Press in August of 2020. I wanted to build a platform designed just for women writers who have stories they want to share with the world.
Whatever your reasons for writing your story, I hope you commit to sharing it with the world. Make writing and sharing your story your love language.