How To Make Your Partner Feel Loved

Have you ever been in a relationship where one day you are standing there wondering where the love went?

Maybe you have been feeling unloved or disconnected and don’t have a clue how to reconnect and recreate that feeling of loving and being loved by your partner.

This is a common relationship problem and one that keeps marriage counselors in business. Unfortunately, even with all the counseling, many couples are unable to recapture that feeling of love they used to feel for each other, and many split up or then divorce.

In the psychological world there is a concept called a Love Map. It is something we developed as a child based on our experiences. This "love map" is unconscious and determines the type of person we "fall" in love with.

A famous marriage expert, Dr. Gotleib from the University of Washington teaches in his seminars a process he calls a “Love Map”. It really isn't a “Love Map” though. What his process does is have couples ask each other lots of questions such as, what is their favorite movie, who is their favorite author, what are some of their favorite books and what is their favorite color is. By asking these questions will learn things about your partner.

But it does not get to these unconscious things that cause us to feel loved. They don’t feel anymore “Loved” when they finished then they did when they started. And therein lays the problem.

What is missing is the process, developed by Ken Ellsworth, called a Love Strategy. A love strategy is a series of things that needs to happen in an exact order and that causes the unconscious knowing of being loved. It's what happens when you are dating someone and fall in love.

Imagine for a moment how life changing it would be if you were taught the exact steps to take to make yourself and your partner feel completely loved?

Imagine if your partner knew your love strategy and could fire it off anytime they wanted to, how loved you would feel?

This one process could recharge or in many cases recreate the love you had for each other when you were first married or committed to each other.

Instead of finding out what your partners favorite movie is you need to learn what their unconscious Love Strategy is.

The book The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman actually comes a bit closer to helping people figure out their partners love map. In his book The Five Love Languages the author discusses 5 different love languages. The five are quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. His concept of a love map is that some people feel loved when they are told they are loved (words of affirmation) someone else might feel loved when their spouse does something for them (acts of service) and yet someone else might feel loved when they are touched a certain way (physical touch).

His premise is that by learning the five love languages, couples will discover their unique love languages and learn practical steps in truly loving each other.

The problem with his program is twofold. Number one let's say your partners “love language” is physical touch. What exactly constitutes physical touch? For different people with the same love language of physical touch it will mean different things. For one person that might be gently rubbing your hand down their back. For another person it might mean spending the evening holding hands watching a movie. So the first problem is even though you might know their “love language” is physical touch you still have to figure out what that means exactly.

I know a couple whose love language is “physical touch” in fact for both of them it is being hugged. The problem they had was learning that each needed a different kind of hug.

For the wife it was is a tender type of hug and for the husband it was a tighter squeezing kind of hug. But a hug is only part of their strategy.

As with most strategies there are specific steps that have to be taken with the hug to fire off their love strategy. For the wife it was a type of talk or certain words right before the hug and for the husband there needed to be not words but a certain kind of smile or facial expression right before the hug.

Until they figured this out they could never figure out why hugging each other never quite worked right and they would walk away feeling unloved.

The second problem is that in reality there are more than just these 5 ways someone can show us and that we can know we are loved. There are literally as many ways as there are different people. We all had different experiences growing up, we all developed different beliefs about what equals being loved and what doesn't.

If you want to get your relationship back on tack, feel loved and make sure your partner feel loved learn their Love Strategy