14 Ways to Communicate Love

We all have our love language(s), so finding a set of gestures that would communicate love universally probably isn't possible. For me, flowers, jewelry, or lavish gifts in February don't especially make me feel loved. (If your significant other's love language includes those things, then go with those too.) However, most of these are everyday actions that clearly communicate love.

For simplicity's sake, I'm going to use he or him when talking about a significant other, simply because mine is in fact male. I don't really want to write, and I doubt you'd want to read, he/she and her/him throughout the entire post. Just know this was an acknowledged choice and the concepts here definitely apply to both women and men. No sexism here, people. Please substitute the appropriate personal pronoun for your situation.

1. Encourage and support him.
Whether written, oral, or even only action-based, provide support for the person you love in his endeavors. Leave encouraging notes in his backpack or briefcase. Cheer him on. Take a responsibility off his plate to allow him to pursue his goals.

2. Be silly and spontaneous together.
My husband excels at this one. He smacks my butt in public. He says awkward or funny things loudly in the store to make me laugh. Keep the giddy feeling alive by keeping it light and silly.

3. Participate in activities he likes.
Even if you don't like doing the things he does (e.g., playing video games) and don't do it with him often, he will likely appreciate your taking the time at least every once in a while and will likely do the same for you.

4. Compliment him.
Especially for situations when you know he wants to do well or has worked hard to accomplish a goal, acknowledge his efforts, the positive aspects of what he did, and the qualities you love about him.

5. Show affection in public as well as in private.
Hold hands and cuddle, even if you've been married "a long time" or if you feel you're far too old for PDA. Please, on behalf of the people around you, don't be disgusting, but at least show that you know and like each other.

6. Give your time.
The word love is really spelled T-I-M-E. Play games, make memories, do service together, do things together, so that when you look back on your life, you remember his integral role in it.

7. Be able to agree to disagree on the small stuff and let it go.
Chances are two separate people with individual minds will not have the exact same opinion about everything. After nearly seven years of marriage, my husband and I agree on big, important issues, but we know what areas we don't. Learn to be okay with those differences.

8. Spend time in the small talk.
Asking about and listening to the specifics of his day and sharing little funny stories that happen in yours make a huge difference.

9. Say "I love you" at least once a day.
For some this may seem obvious, and for others this may be a challenge, but it never hurt anyone to say or hear it more often.

10. Let your actions speak for you.
Although a seeming contradiction of #9, words alone do not communicate love. Perform acts of service for each other, especially meaningful service. Your words and your actions should complement each other in expressing love.

11. Resist the urge to criticize him.
The person you love is imperfect. But so are you. When you are tempted to pick at his faults, put yourself in his shoes. Would you like to be given a laundry list of things to fix about yourself? Especially by the person who claims to love you most? Focus on the amazing things you see in him, the things that made you fall in love with him in the first place.

12. When things in life go wrong, turn to each other.
Talk out problems together, even problems between the two of you, and work toward a solution together. If the two of you need help, seek the appropriate help, but always turn to each other first to show that you trust each other.

13. Take care of yourself and work on improving yourself.
No doubt he loves you how you are already, as he should. However, making an effort to take care of your body and strengthening your own talents and characteristics show your confidence and desire to be a strong partner in the relationship yoke. How does that communicate love? It suggests that you care enough about your relationship with him to contribute give the best of yourself to your life together. A simpler reason: if you don't love yourself, you won't have much to share with someone else.

14. Give meaningful gifts.
Although gifts don't usually do it for me, Tracy has surprised me with significant gestures: not significant in monetary value but significant personally. When he gives me a book I said I wanted to read, I feel he knows me. When he gets tickets to a play I said I was interested in seeing, I know he listens. Gifts can communicate love, if they are significant for him personally.

My husband and I are still working on these items, but that's the beautiful thing about this list and about love in general. We've got time to get better at it. Day after day, year after year.

Why I Willingly Watch the Superbowl and Other Sports with My Husband

Like many wives, I used to mourn the loss of my husband between the months of August and March for the football and basketball seasons. Game after game. Weekend after weekend.

In a little over a week, the Superbowl will be here. But believe it or not, now I'm actually excited about it.

My 95-year-old grandmother watches football and basketball on her own. That sweet, tough old bird taught PE back in her day, married a college football player, and raised six kids: three active boys and three equally active girls. While we lived in Utah, my husband and I watched a football game at her house, and she and my husband talked about the game, both informed and passionate. When she asked me if I was enjoying the game, I explained her about my bare-bone "tolerance" of sports on TV, and she encouraged me to get involved in what my spouse likes and make it interesting for myself.

In recent years, my dread of the football and basketball seasons have become less painful as I've tried to participate in watching sports with my husband. In my own way.

I sit next to him and do something else simultaneously. I type on the computer, crochet or craft, or read, watching key replays and reacting according to his reaction.

Also, I've noticed elements in sports that I actually find interesting.

1. I love listening for odd names. Nearly every team has at least two or three players with horribly cruel first names. Athletes have either dumb or mean parents to name their sons Casanova, Haha, Shabazz, or some combination of random syllables. The name game becomes exponentially more fun if I can find a bizarre first and last name combo.

2. During the fall, audience members bundle up, and I vicariously experience a chilly autumn evening by watching fans shiver. Silly, but it helps me endure living in hot, humid Houston.

3. My husband has a penchant for anticipating and stating exactly what the announcers say or what the coaches do before they do it. (Example: Tracy says, "The coach will call a time out here." The ref blows the whistle signaling a time out. Need another? Tracy says, "The defense should have blitzed there to prevent the play-action pass." Kirk Herbstreit says, "I'm surprised the defense didn't blitz. They could have prevented the play-action pass.") I get a good laugh out of it and have even tried to develop such skills myself. The best I've been able to do is occasionally predict a holding call, but I'm getting better!

Years ago, my husband and I struck a deal. He refrains from watching games on Sunday, and in exchange we make a big deal of the Superbowl, as a whole family. He isn't allowed to shush me (or our future children), and we have tons of yummy snacks! I've enjoyed our Superbowl parties just as much as he has. Plus, most of the commercials are entertaining as well.

Against my expectations, I have actually come to enjoy sitting down with my husband sometimes to watch football and basketball in small dosages. I still don't care for sports statistics, and I doubt I will voluntarily keep abreast of sports on my own, but the point is we turned a point of conflict into something we can do together peacefully. Compromise in marriage at its best! (Now to get him to like BBC Austen adaptations.)

Happy Superbowl to everyone: football lovers or not!

Forget New Year's Resolutions: How to Set and Achieve Goals

I attended a New Year’s Eve party, and not one person admitted to making resolutions. Every single person said, “I don’t make them because I won’t keep ‘em.” Fair enough. It takes only six weeks at the gym to see that people start off enthusiastic and then give up on their resolutions.

However, I feel that most of us set goals on a fairly consistent basis, either for work or school or whatever. We may not set my goals on January 1, but we do have goals and achieve some of them. What enables us to meet some goals successfully and then fail at others?

·         Desire to reach a goal. If I don’t care about it, I won’t do it. I have to want the end result and be able to at least tolerate the steps between to get to the end result.

 ·         Practicality. How can I know if a goal is practical or not? Difficult to say. My suggestion: understand yourself and your limits and then aim a little above that. Be aware of time or other restraints or circumstances that would impede you and either mitigate them or adjust your goal accordingly. Perhaps starting out with a small, easily achievable goal would help me gain confidence and a grasp of how to handle your goal efforts in the context of everyday life. Then again perhaps diving right in and giving everything to the goal forces you to figure out how to handle it all together. Get a feel for what works for you and do it. 

·         Map of steps. For more complicated goals, I need to have a plan of attack or even a set of smaller goals. Cutting a larger goal into bite-sized pieces make the process more palatable. (Enough food metaphor for you?) What steps will lead me to the end result? Map it out and follow it.

 ·         Accountability. If I know someone will ask me about my progress, I will more likely work on that goal. During NaNoWriMo, friends and family members asked me about my progress, which made me want to be able to report only good news. 

·         Buddy system. For some goals, it helps to have someone work on a goal with me. If I forget, he or she can help me remember. If I lose desire, knowing that he or she is doing it too motivates me. 

·         Record of progress. If I work towards a goal but see no progress, it makes me feel that I wasted my effort pointlessly. However, if I monitor my progress, however small, I can see that end result inching closer. Use whatever system of recording that will motivate you. 

·         Smart support and choices. If I want to achieve a goal, I can’t surround myself with things or people who will distract me from achieving that goal. Both the choices we make and the choices of people around us could either support or sabotage efforts toward a goal.

 ·         Rewards. Progress is its own reward in some goals. In others, more tangible rewards help keep motivation up. On the other hand, for me failure is its own punishment. If you need a punishment to ward off laziness or apathy, I suggest keeping it on the lighter side to prevent self-loathing or discouragement. 

·         Overthrow of apathy. If/when apathy sets in, reevaluate the goal. Is it realistic and attainable? Am I seeing the results I want? If not, why not? What can and can’t I change?

 ·         Reflection. I honestly leave this one out most of the time, but it can be helpful for making and accomplishing future goals. What helped you succeed in this goal? What didn’t work that led to failure? What can you learn from it that you can use later or change later?

I really haven’t set any “New Year’s resolutions” for myself, mostly because I was already working on a couple of goals, and I don’t need to add to the pile and make it harder for myself just for convention.

So forget the formal title of resolutions if you want, but don’t give up on setting and at the very least trying to achieve goals. We all are always changing, developing, growing. And goals allow us to have at least some control of how we change, develop, and grow.

Online Christmas Card from the Wulfs

We Wulfs haven't been the best at taking pictures of ourselves in recent years, mostly because we haven't really changed much [physically anyway]. And printing and mailing Christmas cards did not top my priority list this year. Don't take it personally, please. We still like you. No one got a picture Christmas card from us, so here is one for all to enjoy.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Wulf Pack!! We wish you love, joy, and peace this holiday and always.

2013 has been very eventful for the Wulfs. Tracy has become quite the world traveler, going to London, the French Alps, and Norway this year for work. [Yes, I am keeping a running list of the places he has been without me.] He loves his job and has good friends at work. He finishes the Foundation program and receives his first assignment, which will likely last two to three years, in January. As he always has, Tracy still unofficially commentates for any and all sports games he watches, 90% of the time predicting what the commentators will say or having his own debates with the commentators.

Lacey [Isn't it custom to use third person for these things?] had two major surgeries within the first six months of 2013 for two ectopic pregnancies. She also made a difficult career choice and decided to quit her technical writing job. This year hasn't been easy for her, but luckily, she loved serving in the Young Women organization and volunteering more has given her life special meaning in other ways. She participated in NaNoWriMo and completed the challenge . . . but not the novel. Not yet anyway. She spends most of her time writing and researching, crafting little bits here and there, helping friends with their little ones, and cleaning up after Tracy. :)

Tracy and Lacey have downsized back into an apartment for probably the next two or three years. The Wulfs have big plans and high hopes for 2014, and we wish the best for all of you this coming year.

Thank you for being our wonderful friends and loving family.

NaNoWriMo Winner!

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy and that hard." --Neil Gaiman

"There is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story." --Frank Herbert

"Writing for me is largely rewriting." --Khaled Hosseini

I won!! Out of more than 300,000 people who signed up for NaNoWriMo, only 41,940 people completed it, including me!

Okay, I'm done trumpeting my own triumph.

I still have a bit left to do to get the rest of my story down on paper (or screen), but getting this far pushes me to complete it. Maintaining the pace through the holidays will be challenging, but if I can get at least a couple productive writing days in a week, it hopefully won't take too much longer to finish.

And then . . . the games and the editing begin. I only hope that I don't end up trashing one fourth or more in the editing process, but if that's what will make the story better, so be it.

Thanks for all the congratulations! I have amazing friends!

NaNoWriMo Update #3

“10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer
Write.
Write more.
Write even more.
Write even more than that.
Write when you don’t want to.
Write when you do.
Write when you have something to say.
Write when you don’t.
Write every day.
Keep writing.”
― Brian Clark

“Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.
Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.
There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.”
― Neil Gaiman


Day 26
Total word count: 46,699
Pages in Word: 90
Estimated mass market paperback pages:187

In my last post, I said I would share the plot of my story, so I guess I have to deliver now. Just keep in mind, that by sharing this plot idea, I present a brain child to the world like Simba in the Lion King: up for view, for potential admiration or critical judgment.

I have based my novel on true accounts I have read about women during WWII who worked in the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. My novel tells the story of one young woman's experience. I don't want to reveal too much about the storyline, but I hope that tiny snippet simultaneously satisfies and piques people's curiosity about it.

With only a handful of days left in the challenge, I can see that I will not be finished writing down the entire story by the end of this month. I hope that is a sign of a decently strong plot!

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving! This year, I am particularly grateful for the gift of my expression and for this experience. I am also grateful for a supportive husband who has cheered me on this whole time, even at his own inconvenience.

Save Thanksgiving!!

I love Christmas. I like finding gifts for my family, catering presents to their hobbies and personalities, to our inside jokes and connections. But I have to admit that I dislike Christmas shopping. Crowds. Tons of merchandise no one needs. People buying stuff they can't afford. Children screaming--more than usual anyway.

A few years ago, Tracy and I stayed up and decided to go to Walmart to witness our first Black Friday. In the past, we have gone shopping later in the afternoon on Black Friday, well after the rush, and found some items we wanted. But we wanted to see what we had heard about on the news: the mass of humanity in a whirlwind of chaos and greed. Although we did not witness a trampling, we saw people who had three or more TVs stacked in their carts with another cart full of toys. We saw the lines circle completely around the store. In all honesty, my stomach churned. Didn't we just spend a day being grateful for what we have? Now we're stocking up to get more stuff.

I'm sure everyone has heard the news that Walmart will open its doors at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, which shocked me. Even more alarming, Kmart will open its deal-busting doors at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving! Before we can even put the turkey in the oven (much less take it out and eat it), play turkey bowl, watch the parade, count our blessings, or even wish family Happy Thanksgiving, some of us are out anxiously shopping and pushing for deals in store lines, convinced that this stuff will make our holidays meaningful.

Although some companies attribute their early opening to a Christmas season six days shorter this year, I would argue that businesses already start the commercial Christmas season before Halloween. Commercials play jingly tunes before we've carved a pumpkin. Christmas products, decorations, and specialty items crowd the stores well before the spooky costumes leave the shelves. So why do Christmas deals have to occur only on one occasion, Black Friday? Why not have a Black Saturday (or whatever color you'd like to put with it) the Saturday before Thanksgiving? Then wait and have more crazy sales on Black Friday.Why not sprinkle the crazy deals from October through December?

The Huffington Post posted an article a few days ago that made me want to hug some business executives--or at least give them a friendly high five--for the first time ever. Some companies stand for preserving Thanksgiving for the holiday that it should be. I hope that their integrity will be rewarded with increase sales as well as warm fuzzies from doing the right thing.

According to the Huffington Post article, some shoppers have started petitions, which I wouldn't not sign (for the double negative impaired, this means I would sign it), but I think what would send a clearer message to companies is simply not shopping until Black Friday really starts--on Friday. You may miss some deals. You may even have fewer gifts. But there comes a time when you have to decide: what are you willing to spend your holiday time with? Family or things? People or prices?

When I think back on Christmases and Thanksgivings past, I remember some significant gifts, some significant objects or things. But more than that, I remember moments, traditions, time spent with my parents, siblings, and friends that no door-busting deal on a cell phone can replace. I hope people realize that by saving Thanksgiving for family and reflection, we save what truly makes this time of year special.