Quality Time
Spending quality time with your family does not have to diminish your vocational goal. It just means that when you get to the top, they will be there with you.
Quality time is giving someone your undivided attention. It does not mean sitting on the couch watching TV together. When you spend time that way it is the screen that has your attention – not your spouse. The key is to have the screen off, looking at each other and talking, giving each other your undivided attention. It means taking a walk, just the two of you, or going out to eat and looking at each other and talking. Have you ever noticed that in a restaurant, you can almost always tell the difference between a dating and a married couple? Dating couples look at each other and talk. Married couples sit there and gaze around the restaurant. You’d think that they went there to eat!
When you give your loved one twenty minutes of undivided attention and they do the same for you, you are giving each other twenty minutes of life. You will never have those twenty minutes again; you are giving your lives to each other. It is a powerful emotional communicator of love.
Focused Attention
It isn’t enough to just be in the same room with someone. A key ingredient in giving your spouse quality time is giving them focused attention, especially in this era of many distractions. When a father is sitting on the floor, rolling a ball to his two-year-old, his attention is not focused on the ball but on his child. For that brief moment, however long it lasts, they are together. If, however, the father is talking on the phone while he rolls the ball, his attention is diluted.
Quality time does not mean we have to spend our together moments gazing into each other’s eyes. It means that we are doing something together and that we are giving our full attention to the other person. The activity in which we are engaged is incidental. The important thing emotionally is that we are spending focused time with each other. The activity is a vehicle that creates the sense of togetherness. The important thing about the father rolling the ball to the two-year-old is not the activity itself, but the emotions that are created between the father and the child.
How to Have Quality Conversation
Like words of affirmation, the language of quality time also has many dialects. One of the most common dialects is that of quality conversation. Quality conversation is sympathetic dialogue where two individuals are sharing their experiences, thoughts, feelings and desires in a friendly, uninterrupted context. Most individuals who complain that their spouse does not talk do not mean literally that he or she never says a word. They mean that he or she seldom takes part in sympathetic dialogue. If your spouse’s primary love language is quality time, such dialogue is crucial to his or her emotional sense of being loved.
Quality Activities
Quality activities may include anything in which one or both of you has an interest. The emphasis is not what you are doing but on why you are doing it. The purpose is to experience something together, to walk away from it feeling, “He cares about me. He was willing to do something with me that I enjoy, and he did it with a positive attitude.” That is love, and for some people it is love’s loudest voice.
On of the by-products of quality is that they provide a memory bank from which to draw in the years ahead. Those are the memories of love, especially for the person whose primary love language is quality time.
Where Do You Find The Time?
Where do we find time for such activities, especially if both of you have vocations outside of the home? You make time just as you make time for lunch or dinner. Why? Because it is just as essential to your marriage as meals are to your health. Is it difficult? Does it take careful planning? Yes. Does it mean we have to give up some individual activities? Perhaps. Does it mean we do some things we don’t particularly enjoy? Certainly. Is it worth it? Without a doubt. What’s in it for you? The pleasure of living with a spouse who feels loved and knowing that you have learned to speak his or her love language fluently.
Winston Churchill
If we want to be truly effective as leaders in our home and in all areas of our lives we must be radically committed.
People buy into the leader first and then the vision. Many of us are in our peak career building, child rearing years – we will never be as busy in life as we are in this season…and we have to make choices about our commitments.
The challenge is to always remember to make our commitments to those things which are truly important; to family, to friends, to faith.
In 1941, after the vastly outnumbered pilots of the Royal Air Force had stopped Hitler at the Battle of Britain Churchill famously said:
“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense.”