Love Maps

          What a lot of people don’t comprehend or realize is that love changes overtime and it is supposed to change. We can keep on top of this change by enhancing our love maps. So, what is a love map? “Love map” is a term defined by Dr. Gottman as the, “part of your brain where you store all of the relevant information about your partner’s life.” Last week I blogged about friendship as a critical component to marital success. Enhancing our love maps will strengthen our friendship if we attentively update our inventory of knowledge as our spouse continues to grow and change. If you want to be an emotionally intelligent couple Dr. Gottman says you must be “intimately familiar with each other’s world.”

I don’t know about you, but I find myself in the neglecting “love maps” category a lot of the time. I get so caught up with other priorities that there is little cognitive space to keep up with my spouse's ever evolving world.

Licensed mental health counselor Zach Brittle puts it this way: “When you choose to spend your life with someone, you hand them a map to your inner world. But the map you hand your partner is [only] a pencil sketch. The task for couples is to intentionally be adding details to that map by asking questions and telling stories […]”

This week was a great reminder to me that I need to do a better job at creating a detailed love map. I must make a conscious effort to ask more questions of my husband and be a good listener. It really is quite simple, the more we know about our partner, the stronger the connections will be and the more rewarding we will find our relationship. Knowledge really is power! Dr. Gottman says, “The more you know and understand about each other, the easier it is to keep connected as life swirls around you.”

Besides simply sitting down and chatting what is another way to enhance our “love maps”?