You see the reels, TikTok videos, and Facebook montages about men and women who make the effort. The effort, as defined by the video, is a large display of affection that costs hundreds of dollars. Usually, these videos are followed up with the phrase “if he or she wanted to, they would”. This can be unrealistic for a variety of reasons and ultimately shames couples who cannot commit to large gestures like surprise lavish vacations, expensive jewelry or flower deliver, or other pricey gifts. This is an area where, as couples, we need to shift our expectations. This is often a topic I have seen in various video comments, primarily by women. Comparing what material items are provided in a relationship will not make you happy and feeling shamed because you cannot afford to spoil your spouse or be spoiled yourself can breed resentment. This is an example of social media distorting real life because very few people ever post the difficult parts on their Instagram pages.

I was guilty of this; I am a hopeless romantic who saw all the things that some men did for their spouses, and I coveted it. In the five years that Mark, and I have been married, I can count the expensive gestures on one hand. There have been a few, like surprise expensive dinners or a Samsung watch after our second child but he is not a huge romantic like I am. When I complained in our first year of marriage, to women much wiser than me, about the lack of roses and emotion filled poems and social media posts I was asked a very important question. You are focusing on what he hasn’t done, but what does he do? My husband takes phone calls anytime he has a free moment to talk to the kids and I at work. He videochats to help me reign in our mini sailors to avoid mutiny. He will leave work for every doctor’s appointment, participates in our daughter’s speech therapy, and shows up whenever we need him. Mark knows my order for every restaurant we eat at and all my favorite seasonal coffee drinks. He has come home many times with a snack or a drink when I am overwhelmed and takes over parenting duties after working all day. He’s not a poet, but he has the best jokes and that can help me look at things differently. He doesn’t give flowers often, but he recreates my wedding bouquet every anniversary with the same numbers of each flower. We don’t take expensive vacations, but we do go on family adventures to pick apples and flowers. The point of this area of the post is to ask yourself, instead of the things your spouse is not doing can you name what they are doing?

If you find yourself staring at the last paragraph without an answer to your question, do you know your love languages? My husband and I took the love language test at Love language Test | Find your love language (love-language.co) this truly helped us to figure out how we feel loved and what we could do to make the other feel loved as well. I also recommend the book and if your spouse is in the military there is a 5 love languages military edition. After you and your spouse take the quiz, have a conversation of what this means to you, your relationship, and what you both need to feel loved and valued. Marriages are not meant to be measured against other marriages to determine success, you determine success based on your collective happiness, fulfillment, and commitment. Love is a feeling that does not come easy all the time, we each wake up with a choice to make whether to love and honor our spouse or not. Some seasons of marriage this choice may be harder than others, but it does not mean you have a bad marriage it means there is room for improvement.