Week 4 - Love is Thoughtful

How precious also are your thoughts to me...How vast is the sum of them!  If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand.  ~ Psalm 139:17-18

When I read the title for this week's portion of The Love Dare, my first thought was "this will be about random acts of kindness," but I was wrong.  While we do like to be thought of by our mates, and have little, unexpected things done for us, this week's lesson was more about HOW we think.

We men are very linear thinkers.  We focus on one subject at a time and excel at it.  While this might have been quite useful in our ancient hunter-killer days, and is still useful occasionally when we find ourselves under pressure, it can work against us.  Therapist and I like to say I have my "boxes" of thought; let me have one, maybe two boxes open at any given time, and I'm fine.  But I reach a point when I've got to close some boxes before I open new boxes of thought.

Women, on the other hand, are masters of multi-tasking thought.  They can cook, clean, talk on the phone, and keep up with the kids, all at once!  Therapist has a graduate degree in this, with four kids to corral at home, to school, back and forth between sporting events, and now getting to factor me and Mini-Me into the picture on occasion.  But that's one of the things I love about her, and love to just watch and admire as an art form of its own.

About "love being thoughtful" thought, it's more about us understanding that we're genetically wired to think differently.  In a relationship, we've got to learn to understand that dynamic.  There's another study series that describes men and women as having "blue" and "pink" hearing aids, megaphones, and glasses.  How I communicate in a "blue/guy" way, Therapist may hear, process, and understand from a "pink/woman" perspective...and miss the message.  Of course this works in reverse too.  Maybe we need to learn how to both speak "purple" !

Seriously though, I'm blessed with Therapist.  She's shown that understands this dynamic in communication (and mis-communication!), and we do take a lot of time to make sure we both speak and understand clearly.

Love is Patient, Kind, Unselfish, and Thoughtful!  And it is a LOT of FUN!!!