Gary Chapman
In reality, relationships that are successful tend to take the attitude, 'How can I help you?' 'How can I enrich your life?' 'How can I be a better husband to you,' if it's a marriage.Collection: Marriage
People need to know their marriage is worth fighting for.Collection: Marriage
For a long time, I have been wanting to write a book for singles that would help them in the dating process and in getting ready for marriage. Most of my writing, I've written to couples who are already married, because I've been doing marriage counseling for 35 years.Collection: Dating
The human race could not go on without reproduction, and marriage creates the most secure environment in which to raise children.Collection: Marriage
I wish I'd known that apologizing is a sign of strength. I had the impression that if you apologize, it's a sign of weakness. I kind of picked up the message from my father, 'Real men don't apologize. You just do your best, and if you happen to hurt some people, that's their fault. You just go on. Don't apologize. That's a sign of weakness.'Collection: Strength
The object of love is not getting something you want but doing something for the well-being of the one you love.Collection: Love Is
Love can be expressed and received in all five languages. However, if you don't speak a person's primary love language, that person will not feel loved, even though you may be speaking the other four. Once you are speaking his or her primary love language fluently, then you can sprinkle in the other four and they will be like icing on the cake.Collection: Cake
Life's deepest meaning is not found in accomplishments , but in relationshipsCollection: Accomplishment
Expressing love in the right language. We tend to speak our own love language, to express love to others in a language that would make us feel loved. But if it is not his/her primary love language, it will not mean to them what it would mean to us.Collection: Mean
Our most basic emotional need is not to fall in love but to be genuinely loved by another, to know a love that grows out of reason and choice, not instinct. I need to be loved by someone who chooses to love me, who sees in me something worth loving.Collection: Falling In Love
Love doesn't erase the past, but it makes the future different.Collection: Positivity
Love is a choice you make everyday.Collection: Positivity
We can choose the attitude that says, I have been wronged. People have hurt me, but with the help of God, I am going to learn how to return good for evil, and I am going to make a difference in this world.Collection: Hurt
Respect begins with this attitude: "I acknowledge that you are a creature of extreme worth. God has endowed you with certain abilities and emotions. Therefore I respect you as a person. I will not desecrate your worth by making critical remarks about your intellect, your judgment or your logic. I will seek to understand you and grant you the freedom to think differently from the way I think and to experience emotions that I may not experience." Respect means that you give the other person the freedom to be an individual.Collection: Attitude
Forgiveness is not a feeling; it is a commitment. It is a choice to show mercy, not to hold the offense up against the offender. Forgiveness is an expression of love.Collection: Commitment
Ask yourself: Does the action I am considering have any potential for dealing with the wrong and helping the relationship? And is it best for the person at whom I am angry? The two most constructive options are either to confront the person in a helpful way, or to consciously decide to overlook the matter.Collection: Two
In marriage it is never having my own way. It is rather discovering our way.Collection: Way
One [reality] is that I am responsible for my attitude. I can be in prison, and I happen to get a chance to go outside. I can look at the mud, or I can look at the stars. I am the one who decides which way to look. That is true for every one of us.Collection: Stars
Forgiveness is not a feeling; it is a commitment.Collection: Commitment
Love is something you do for someone else, not something you do for yourself.Collection: Forgiveness
Nobody has the power to make you miserable . . . unless you choose to give them that power. Choose to enjoy every drop of today!Collection: Giving
Marriages are always moving from one season to another. Sometimes we find ourselves in winter--discouraged, detached, and dissatisfied; other times we experience springtime, with its openness, hope, and anticipation. On still other occasions we bask in the warmth of summer--comfortable, relaxed, enjoying life. And then comes fall with its uncertainty, negligence, and apprehension. The cycle repeats itself many times throughout the life of a marriage, just as the seasons repeat themselves in nature.Collection: Summer
We can certainly see contemporary examples of people who radically change. As long you believe your spouse will never change and you keep telling yourself that, then you live with no hope. But if you understand that that's a myth, then you open up the door to hope.Collection: Believe
The one who chooses to love will find appropriate ways to express that decision everyday.Collection: Decision
Before I discovered the concept of the 5 love languages, a bit of advice I was given was to become a student of my wife and to take time to learn what makes her feel loved. I soon learned that what makes her feel loved may not always be the thing I want to do because it may not come natural to me. But learning to love her in the way that makes her feel loved is a greater demonstration of my love for her, because I've chosen to do it with a goal of pleasing her.Collection: Goal
For love, we will climb mountains, cross seas, traverse desert sands, and endure untold hardships. Without love, mountains become unclimbable, seas uncrossable, deserts unbearable, and hardships our lot in life.Collection: Sea
Empathetic listening is an awesome medication for the hurting heart.Collection: Hurt
Togetherness has to do with focused attention. It is giving someone your undivided attention. As humans, we have a fundamental desire to connect with others. We may be in the presence of people all day long, but we do not always feel connected.Collection: Long
Recent research has indicated that the average individual listens for only seventeen seconds before interrupting and interjecting his own ideas.Collection: Average
What we dislike in others is often a weakness in our own lives.Collection: Weakness
I have been doing marriage counseling for about 15 years and I realized that what makes one person feel loved, doesn't make another person feel loved.Collection: Love
I wrote this book [ Desperate Marriages] because of my own marriage. My wife and I struggled greatly in the early years of marriage. In spite of the fact that we were Christians before we got married, we prayed about getting married, we believed it was God's will for us to get married, and we still had great struggles.Collection: Christian
Good marriages are built upon a combination of emotional love and a common commitment to a core of beliefs about what is important in life and what we wish to do with our lives. Speaking each other's primary love language creates the emotional climate where these beliefs can be fleshed out in daily life.Collection: Commitment
I think another [myth] is that some marriages are just hopeless. This is a common thing I hear from people, "Well, I just think there are some marriages that are hopeless, Dr. Chapman, don't you agree with that?" I say I understand the feeling, but the fact is that there are no marriages that are hopeless.Collection: Thinking
The reality is, if you go to the library and read biographies, thousands of people have changed, radically changed. St. Augustine was one of them. He lived a terrible a life for the first 33 years, and then he radically changed.Collection: Reality
Many couples have never learned the tremendous power of verbally affirming each other.Collection: Marriage
The in-love experience does not focus on our own growth or on the growth and development of the other person. Rather, it gives us the sense that we have arrived and that we do not need further growth.Collection: Giving
On the other hand, if I walk in the house, I don't even bother to find her, I just walk in the den and flip on the TV, get myself something to drink, sit down, start unwinding, I have influenced my wife in a very negative way.Collection: Hands
We can look at the pain in our lives. We can look at the way we have been mistreated, and we can have an attitude of, I will never amount to anything. I have been wrong about people all my life. I am going to pay somebody back for this.Collection: Pain
The pattern often has been entrenched since childhood... [abusive people] don't think that there is anything wrong with them because that is the way they were brought up in their family.Collection: Thinking
A soft answer turns away anger.Collection: Answers
Our spouse will usually interpret our message based on our tone of voice, not the words we use.Collection: Voice
I would encourage you to make your own investigation of the one whom, as He died, prayed for those who killed Him: 'Father forgive them for they know not what they do.' That is love's ultimate expression.Collection: Father
I think that in today's world, by nature, we are all self-centered. And that often leads to selfishness.Collection: Thinking
Much of the misbehavior of children is motivated by the cravings of an empty LOVE TANK.Collection: Children
At the heart of mankind's existence is the desire to be intimate and to be loved by another. Marriage is designed to meet that need for intimacy and love.Collection: Heart
This is a huge thing if you are going to have a positive impact on your spouse. You have to not only realize this, but you have to practice this.Collection: Impact
I hope the reader's sense that I am deeply empathetic with the pain of being in a desperate marriage, but I also believe that the person who is married to the abuser or the alcoholic or whomever has the greatest potential for helping them.Collection: Pain
I am not minimizing emotions. Emotions are an important part of life.Collection: Important
We cannot rely on our native tongue if our spouse does not understand it. If we want them to feel the love we are trying to communicate, we must express it in his or her primary love language.Collection: Trying