I speak diamonds and iPods…

We are going through the Five Love Languages in our Nearly/Newly Sunday School class. I love this book. It’s a must read.

As Chris and I were thumbing through the book Saturday night, he says “Okay for me to say your love language is diamonds?”

“Yes, as long as it’s okay for me to say I haven’t been spoken to in that language in several years.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

We read this book and took the test on our own way back in the second year of our marriage.

Chris and I, being the obvious ultimate authority, have a theory on marriage.

The first year is all surface stuff. Love you, don’t want to be apart from you, soul mate, yada, yada, yada. Underneath all of that is the wife’s thoughts go from:

“Oh Pookie-Bear. He left his wet towel on the bathroom floor again.”

To

“I wonder if I leave it here to mildew if he’ll actually pick it up and use it again tomorrow.”

To

“Are you kidding me with this disgusting towel on the floor?!?!?! It smells to high heaven!”

Meanwhile, the husband is thinking:

“I love the casseroles my wife makes but I wonder if we could have just chicken and potatoes one night. Oh well, she’s hot.”

To

“Mexican casserole again? Maybe I should call Mom and have her send some of her recipes to my wife. But man, she’s hot.”

To

“I cannot eat one more morsel of that horrible casserole. Why can’t she just cook normal meals? Good thing she’s hot.”

(Disclaimer: Chris does not leave wet towels on the floor and I have never made a Mexican casserole. The part about the wife being hot is completely true however.)

Of course, none of that is actually said out loud. They’re too busy smiling and being all "happily ever after” to acknowledge that hey, this isn’t exactly what I thought it’d be.

Year two you find yourself sitting across the table from someone who doesn’t get you AT ALL and wondering what happened to the guy who bought me the soundtrack to the first movie we ever saw together.

If you work at it hard enough, lay it all out on the table, the marriage will be far better than whatever romantic fantasy you had built up in your imagination.

Which makes the third year the awesomest.

But all that is just our theory. Perhaps we’re the only couple in the entire history of married people who struggled with that. Although, with the divorce rate at 50%, I somehow doubt it.

And this is why we are helping lead the Nearly/Newly class at church. We’ve been there. Lived through it. Still working on it.

And the Five Love Languages hits home with us.

My primary love language is Gifts and my secondary is Words of Affirmation.

Gifts is by far the worst love language you can speak. At least in my experience.

If someone does not speak it, it’s nearly impossible to learn. Why? Because part of good gift giving is knowing how to give the right gift at the right time. Some days that could be a snack size bag of M&M’s. Some days that’s a bouquet of flowers. Some days that’s a new necklace.

Add to that Chris’ ridiculous lack of free time and gift giving becomes an even bigger challenge.

So I was rather thrilled when he showed up Sunday afternoon with this:

My iPod from 2006 is ancient stuff. Chris said it only had 2 GB of memory. I think that’s what he said. I kind of zone out when he speaks computer. This one apparently has 16 GB of memory. Again, not totally sure what that means but 16 is way bigger than 2.

It holds all of the music in my library. ALL! It has a video camera, a radio tuner and a pedometer. Basically, it does everything but run for me.

To all of you who absolutely do not speak “Gift” (and there were a lot in Sunday School last week – one couple actually doesn’t even give Christmas gifts to each other which is just all kinds of wrong.), you have no idea how much this little blue iPod means. Every morning I see it on my treadmill and think about my fabulous husband who took some of his very limited free time to shop for me.

Cha-ching into the love bank.

And swoon. He’s so hot.