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Hey there friends. Welcome to the better postpartum podcast. I’m your host Angel Swan, crunchy mom, coffee addict and postpartum doula turned new mom, coach. This podcast is your audio guide to not just surviving, but thriving during those early and newborn days. If you want to care for yourself, your household and your baby with confidence, grab your earbuds because this is the only podcast that you need. So what do you say? Should we get started with today’s episode? Let’s do this. Hey, friends, thank you so much for tuning in today. Before we get started, I just wanted to read this really awesome review submitted by NAS Dalton. So it says I am an upcoming mother with a small support group and a lot of questions. Angel follow me on social media. And suddenly a whole lot of answers became available to me. She is a font of information support, kindness and resources. The podcast episodes aren’t crazy long an angel does her research. I appreciate that she’s willing to share her time with everyone. Thank you. I have a friend who is two months behind me in pregnancy. And I’ve already shared this awesome find. Thank you so much for that review. If you have been loving this podcast and you’re learning from it, please go over to Apple podcasts. And make sure you subscribe, leave me a five star rating and a review those little love notes that you leave me seriously make my day. And it really does help other new moms to find this podcast so that they can learn from it too. So thank you again to nas doughton. Now let’s get into today’s episode, How To Use Your love languages to strengthen your relationship with your partner, even if your baby seems to be holding all your attention. So what the heck are the five love languages? Have you ever heard of it? The Five Love Languages is it’s just basically another kind of personality test. But this one is more geared toward specifically helping you understand yourself and your partner better so that you can have a stronger relationship and more easily like resolve conflicts, or even avoid complex all together. Right. So the idea is that different people have different personalities, which means that we all give and receive love in different ways. So if you can learn the preferences of yourself and your partner, then you can more easily pinpoint the root cause of conflicts, you’ll connect on a deeper level. And then in turn, you’ll be strengthening your relationship. So like I said before, there’s five different kinds of love languages. There’s receiving gifts, quality, time, words of affirmation, physical touch, and acts of service. They’re all pretty self explanatory, but I’ll just break them down really quickly to give you a better idea of what they are. So if your love language is receiving gifts, this means that nothing makes you feel more loved than getting a thoughtful gift. You feel most loved if your partner brings you something home from the store, like while they were out running errands and they just like thought they saw something they thought that you might like it. And so that brought it home for you, that makes you feel so loved right? If your love language is quality time you feel most loved when you receive undivided attention. You just want to have some real one on one time together to just hang out and connect. Even if it’s just doing nothing, right you just want to be together.

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If your love language is words of affirmation, then that means that you use words of affirmation, which is basically like praise, encouragement, just saying nice things that affirm other people and like lift them up. It means a lot to you when someone tells you that you’re doing a good job that you look nice today like things like that. If your love language is physical touch that is most meaningful to you to have appropriate physical contact with your partner. So like, if there’s any next to you, you would just love it if they’d put a hand on your knee or you appreciate the like a gentle touch on the shoulder or your back as your partner walks by that sort of thing. And finally, if your love language is acts of service and to you actions speak louder than words, you would much rather have your partner cook you breakfast and bread in bed than have them say something sweet about like how you look today. Now I will say you might identify with more than one of these and that’s totally okay and normal. It’s not like a hard and fast thing. But it’s really good to know your own love language and your partners because it can help you guys connect in a way that is meaningful to the both of you. Basically, it just like takes the guesswork out of it all. So bringing this back to like having a family having your baby Let’s say your love language is acts of service and your partners is words of affirmation, we’re getting into a scenario. So yours is acts of service, your partners is words of affirmation, alright, so say that you have been home all day with the baby, you’ve been taking care of them, you’ve been doing a bunch of chores. And when your partner gets home from work, you’re really, really hoping that they’re going to offer to take the baby for a little while. So you can just go ahead and get a bit of me time in before you all settle in for the evening. But instead, your partner comes home, they tell you, wow, that was really looks great, thank you so much for tidying up. And then they settle in on the couch, and they unwind and watch some TV. Of course, you get upset because you’re not getting what you wanted or needed. Your partner has no idea that they’ve upset you. Because you haven’t communicated to them that you would really appreciate their help, aka acts of service. So instead of having a nice evening, you are fuming, your partner can tell that you’re upset, but they’re kind of scared to say anything, and you’re both uncomfortable for the rest of the evening. Then your baby picks up on that energy. And then they get extra fuzzy, which only drives the wedge deeper between you and your partner, tensions will just keep getting higher, right? Does that sound familiar? Now let’s pretend that you guys both know your love languages, you’ve communicated them to each other, you’ve shared your love languages with each other. So now you know how to meet each other’s needs. Alright, let’s redo this scenario. As if you guys both know what each other needs. Okay, so you’ve been home all day with the baby, and your partner comes home from work, they can see all the hard work that you have done today. You know, the dishes have been cleaned up the laundry has been done. And they’re like, whoa, thank you so much for doing all that. And they’re gonna say thank you, because that’s their love language, right, they’re still going to do the things that they feel is like important to be loved. So then you say something like, it’s so nice to have you home, we really missed you today. Because you know that your partner feels loved when you give them words of affirmation. So your partner’s getting what they need at this point, then your partner offers to take the baby so that you can go and have a moment to yourself, because they know that you need to receive acts of kindness or acts of service, I mean, to feel the most loved. So your partner takes the baby, and you get to go and take an extra long shower to wash any stress of the day off of you. Your needs have been met, your partner’s needs have been met. And then you all read and reunite after your shower and you play together as a family. And you have a wonderful evening. Do you see how different things can be when you and your partner actually take the time to work on this together. That’s the thing. It takes work. You both have to know your love languages, you have to share them with each other, and then actively work to fulfill each other’s needs. But once you’ve done this work, it really makes a huge difference in your day. And it helps to keep the peace in your relationship in your home. Even with the stress that can come when you have a baby.

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If you do this exercise, and after a few weeks or months, you notice that things are kind of starting to get a little tense. Maybe a little bit of regression, right? Come back to your love languages and just have a conversation about it. Like a little refresher. And then keep working on improving. This isn’t something that you just do. Like one time and bam, all your problems are solved forever. You’ve made it just like anything else and our relationship. This takes time. It takes work. And it’s important to be able to connect like this when you have a baby because we don’t have time for guesswork. We don’t have time for it. The baby is taking up so much time we do not have time to guess. We’ve got to know what the other person needs. So that we can, you know, make it work. That’s just what it is. I know when Eric and I were in premarital counseling, we were actually made to do this exercise as well. And you can probably hear my cat so jangling again, that’s Stella. Anyway, but we did this exercise and like, I actually thought I knew Eric’s love language, but like, I had no idea. And he didn’t know mine either. Like we kind of we did our own survey and then we like guessed how the other person would answer it. And we were both super wrong. So we had been together for years, right? But we still had no idea what the other person really, really wanted or needed to feel loved. So just from my own Personal experience just giving you an example of how this can really make a difference because you just can’t know unless you know unless you know for sure so if this is something that you want to use if you want to you know use your love languages to strengthen your relationship with your partner and like just understand each other on like a deeper level you can go to five love languages calm that’s the number five love languages calm and you take their quiz and you learn your love language, your partner will will take the quiz and learn learn their love language. And then you share it with each other, you share your results. You can talk about it, you know, let’s talk about what you thought that they needed and versus what they actually need. And all that good stuff is very, very interesting when you get the results because you like I said before, like we had no idea. But really I do recommend at least doing the quiz online. And then I I recommend if you want to like take it a step further. Go ahead and read the book. Yes, there’s a book. It’s called The Five Love Languages. The secret to love that last, so I’ll put my affiliate link in the episode description so that if you want to grab the book, you can easily go and get it on Amazon. Alright friends, as always. Thank you for listening. Do not forget that you can come hang out with me on Instagram at Angel swan. You can grab my free postpartum planner on my website, Angel Swan calm. And of course, don’t forget to go over to Apple podcasts and rate review and subscribe to the better postpartum podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the better postpartum podcast. Here’s what I want you to do next. If you loved what you heard today, would you do me a giant favor and leave me a written five star review? Those little love notes that you leave are the perfect way to thank me for putting out these episodes just for you. Seriously, it would mean the world to me. Next, take a screenshot of the episode you’re listening to right now and share it on your Instagram stories and make sure you tag me at Angel dot swan. That’s SW o n so that more moms can find this podcast and hopefully you get the advice and encouragement they need to truly thrive with their babies. And don’t forget to come back every single week for more nuggets of wisdom and truth bombs about the early motherhood journey. I’ll talk to you next time. Bye bye