We had to buy this book:
Now, I honestly thought we had to buy it, like we were going to use it for the Pre-Marital Class the next day after I bought it. Then I realized that it was a suggested read, which I'm glad I didn't know before, or else I wouldn't have bought it...or at least not right away... I would've looked for a dirt cheap one from Half.com. Anyway, soon after purchasing the book, we both took the profile assessments to see our main love language. We both have Acts of Service and Quality Time as the top two ranked languages. You can take the quizzes here:
We have read through over half of the book since last Saturday. I am not big on self-help-ish kind of books. I am not big on cheesy stuff at all, but I am pretty sold on anything that makes people actually see each other and talk about important critical things, especially when it comes to relationships, and of course, especially when it comes to marriage.
Within one week of reading and recognizing each other as certainly an "other," someone who is not me, we have begun to handle conflict so much more effectively. We have spent hours at a time talking about the issues this book brings up, what it really means to be selfless, and when we knew that the "in love" fuzzies had gone away and this was for real. Tony and I faced a lot of external conflict when we first began which forced us to put an unfathomable amount of value on each other and the relationship. Though I did not enjoy the conflict as it was happening, it helped us to get through the time a new relationship could lose its luster or feeling of novelty. We had "fought" to be together, so we decided we were worth sticking around, even when it got to be mundane and everyday-ish.
More and more, I find us becoming partners...not just in the romantic sense, but in business, life decisions, and finances. We just recently worked together while taking engagement photos for his brother and his fiance. Before reading this book, or perhaps just before we'd really had a starting place for serious, intimate conversations, we might've treated the day as a "work only" experience and not as a perhaps unorthodox way to build our relationship. By Tony noticing when I was getting tired after 3 1/2 hours of strategically holding a light reflector and by him not letting himself get annoyed by my not maintaining the level of excitement he's able to keep during a project until it's totally completed, he showed me a lot of love. His understanding and refusal to treat me as just an assistant and not his partner in life really showed me that he sees me...
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