Love Language By Dr. Juan Harrison

Sometimes I marvel at the two totally different phases of our marriage. As a young couple in the early days of our 50-year journey it was a lot more ush and gush, holding hands, looking lovingly into one another’s eyes.  Today there’s less touch and more looks or glances as we hurry on our way to a multitude of tasks.  I’m thinking of replacing the word retirement with just plain tirement.  I can’t remember the last time I hadn’t felt a feeling of tirement as my energy reserve has tended to shrink.

It seems like more often than not these days a lot of what we do is work as a team to get things done.  Maybe she asks me to put on a pot of beans while she’s in the middle of doing something related to her preschool.  Maybe she needs me to peel and chop some potatoes and onions for some soup or an apple and some onion and peel an egg for some tuna fish for us to be shared with her semi shut-in dad.  I wash and /or dry.  I put em into the washer or take em out of the dryer and fold em and put them up.

Love language for you and your spouse may have changed like ours did.  I still remember as a little boy the feeling of security and peacefulness as I watched my mom and dad side by side, each pulling a cotton sack and chatting away about something as their hands busily pulled the cotton bolls off the stalk and stuffed them into their sacks. 

Sometimes I think maybe the lives of our younger folks, particularly their marriages, might have missed out on some of the closeness us older folks may have experienced as we grew up on the farm where it took all hands-on deck to get all the eggs gathered and the hogs slopped.  Today in our world of two wage earners with some part-time side hustle work it seems to keep the younger folks tied up to their gills just to keep the wolf away from the door.

I don’t know.  Have we spoiled ourselves and think we have to have a lot more junk.  Or, has everything gotten so expensive that the cart is just about pulling the horse.  Either way, I can’t help thinking we might be a sight better off if we could get back more to the love language of helping one another out a bit more to help get er dun.

By Dr. Juan Harrison