Love Talk

When my wife & I were engaged, we went attended an engagement class at our church & went through Les & Leslie Parrott’s Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts, We found it quite helpful & so I was hoping that Love Talk would be equally as helpful. However, we had also gone through The Five Love Languages in our newlywed small-group, and I was wondering if it was just the same basic info in a new light.

I was happy that Love Talk is totally different that The Five Love Languages. The book is quite helpful, but I am excited about taking my small group through the curriculum. I found it very insightful, and quite helpful in my marriage relationship.

The book and DVD are not meant to offer techniques on how to talk to one another, because then many couples would be more focused on the techniques than actual communication. They say that what they would like to get across is that feeling of couples being on the same page with one another. The basic thought they want couples to be able to do after going through this material comes from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – “Seek to understand before being understood.”

One of the things that became clear for me was the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is when you try to put yourself in another’s shoes; empathy is when you attempt to understand how another views things from their own shoes. We all are created differently and even by putting ourselves in another’s shoes, we still will not understand what they are feeling, what thought processes they may be having. Only when we try to grasp things from their point of view will we truly come closest to understanding them.

Being understood is really what most of us are seeking. And who better to “get” us than our spouse? According to authors, “more than any other measure, couples gauge the depth of their connection by the satisfaction of their conversations.

How the authors offer to help the reader/viewer to understand their spouse better is by understanding one another’s emotional fear factors (which cause us to be guarded) and how that correlates to how we feel most comfortable communicating. That, to me, was the most helpful aspect of Love Talk.

Also available are workbooks for men and women, respectively. I didn’t find these as helpful. I imagine that for some people, thinking about it in exercise form will help them grasp it better, but the book and DVD was sufficient for me. The DVD has six sessions on it all around 10 minutes long and are very engaging and definitely a great addition to any small group going through the book.