Quality Time

So I've been watching the Bachelorette this season. (Here's hoping 1000 xs that JoJo finds love! She's great!) Any on the show JoJo keeps mentioning that her love language is word or affirmation. And had I recently-ish reread my blog posts, it keeps reminding me to make a correction here.

I previously posted about my love language months ago. The problem being that I didn't actually finish the book, OR TAKE THE TEST, until after I wrote that blog. By finishing the book I realized my love language is Quality Time. And I've been thinking a lot about that lately, what with the Bachelorette reminder and other things. So I figured I'd correct my blog talk about that for a while.

When I started reading the Love Language book (I read the single person version *sigh*) I thought for sure words of affirmation was my love language for receiving love, and that I showed love through acts of service. So I was surprised to see quality time ekk out the winner as my love language. I thought, "but I'm an introvert, I don't need a lot of time around people." But reading about it made sense. Besides it's quality time, not quantity time.

After thinking about it quality time makes perfect sense to me. I think about my best friend and me. We can go over a month without seeing each other, even though we live really close. We're just busy people. But when we do get together it's great! She's one of the few people (like I could count on a hand amount) I can truly talk about anything with. And it always feels like no time has past. It also helps that in between in person visits we text and email. I think it helps that we know each other well and are both introverts. So we can share silly or personal or just random things electronically.

I also think about my mom. My worst love language is gifts. I suck at buying gifts. I get too in my head, so unless I'm lucky to get inspiration I get overwhelmed. So when it comes time for Mother's Day or my mom's birthday, I prefer to take her out and spend time together. I think we're alike in that we're not very materialistic, so it's a great way to show love.

This also explains some less than positive stuff. Like when I was first getting to know one of my best friends, back in school. She has a habit of being flaky sometimes. I used to take it personally and get really upset when she'd bail last minute. I am the kind of person who when I make plans I will be there, even if my introvert self wants to stay home. But after a while I just learned that's how she is. I learned her behavior patterns. I learned her love language is probably more acts of service or gifts. So she just showed her friendship in different ways. Sometimes she just excited about friend time but forgets or doesn't think about other commitments.  But she's so caring and a true friend. It just takes learning people's differences.

That's not to say that I don't have trouble with understanding how people feel about me. For me there's always that place with people between "even if I like you I wouldn't mind if I never saw you again" and "I know you really like me so I can't scare you away with my awkward weirdness." People in the middle are people I would care if they went away, I'd care a lot, but I am still unsure of how much they actually tolerate me. Most of my closest friends have been in this group at some point. I think it may have to do with quality time. Like if there's too much time between when we talk so we weren't able to build good enough rapport. Or when I really like someone and want to spend quality time getting to know them, but they never seem interested. Maybe some people can feel likes friends just by casually talking to people occasionally, but I can't. Like I know this guy who thinks tons of people are his buddy and counts lots of people as his friends. He's super extroverted! Where I am such the opposite. It took me a lot longer to consider him a friend. Not that he's not perfectly likeable. But as an introvert I take longer to consider people friends and tend to have a smaller friend circle.

So why talk about quality time? Well for one, it's been on my mind lately and since it's me, I have to write stuff down sometimes before it drives me crazy thinking. Plus I haven't posted a blog that's not super miserable so I figured I'd do something different. If people read this, I think it will be a good lesson on stuff. Like how to tell I consider you someone I care about, how to show me you care (like let's hang out, duh!), or hopefully get you thinking about your love language and that of those around you! At the very least, maybe someone reading this likes the Bachelorette and wants to talk about it!!