With Valentine’s Day coming up, we want to offer you some practical ideas regarding love for your family. Love can be expressed in a multitude of ways and it’s the greatest gift we can offer our spouse and children. Here are three thoughts we continue to focus on in our marriage and family. Being intentional with these things has changed who we are as a couple and who we’ve become as a family.
Our Marriage and the love that flows out of it brings an extra layer of love and security for our children. Our children don’t intuitively know the depth and breadth of love we have for our spouse. We typically talk or spend time together after the kids go to bed, but our children needed to see love and friendship between us regularly. They need to witness tangible evidence of our love. It provides emotional security for our children and us too.
CouchTime and Date Night are two meaningful ways that can strengthen a marriage and bring harmony to the home. Both are Times of Non Conflict (TONIC) where we can connect with one another relationally and emotionally. CouchTime allows us to discuss those practical things we often take for granted until it becomes an urgent matter – Issues about parenting, finances, in laws, other relationships, etc… Date Night reminds us, and our children, that we were a family before we had kids; that we need to connect emotionally has husband and wife.
Our Family Identity is Love. Who we are as a family and what we represent is conveyed as love. “Love” as a hallmark of your family may seem corny, cliche or obvious to some, but we wanted to keep the message of love in front of our kids as much as possible.Working on our Family Identity and discussing our Core Family Values has always been a top priority. With love at its heart, we adopted a Family Verse which the boys learned from the time they were little:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength…And Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Mark 12: 30-31
We talked about the verse from time to time around the dinner table and when other opportunities came up. Our family verse became the standard we tried to live out in our marriage, within our family and outside our home as well. It is the anchor of who we try to be as the Howards and a way to measure our actions and attitudes.
Our Love Languages are the way to demonstrate love to our spouse, our kids and to others in their emotional language. Most people know about Love Languages from when they were engaged or if they attended a marriage retreat. But how many of us regularly speak our spouse’s or children’s love language? If you carefully evaluate how you are expressing your love to your spouse and kids, you may discover that you are projecting your own love language on them and they may be missing out on the love and affirmation you are trying to convey!
Over the years we’ve discovered that our Love Languages can change depending upon the season of life we are living. For example, prior to Covid, we may have been Quality Time, but now it might be Acts of Service. That’s why we try to retake the love languages test a couple times a year as a family. Then we would go around the dinner table discussing ways we would like to see our love languages demonstrated. This kept everyone mindful of each family members Love Language. In fact, we took it a step further and put it on the refrigerator for all to see! We have the Love Language tests (adults & kids) on our resource page: https://onefamilyhwl.org/resources/. Share the results with each other and get creative with speaking each other’s love languages!
Now that our boys are young adults, we can see the many ways being intentional with love has blessed our marriage, our boys and friends. May you and your family find as much encouragement and success with these principles as we have through the years. Love is the most dynamic force known to man, it changes lives and leads us toward an abundant life. Take some time to talk about Love this Valentine’s Day!
“Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.”
1 Corinthians 13:13
Blessings and Love to you and your family,
Shelly & Rich
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