Love Map

In John M. Gottman’s book “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work” he explains that to make a marriage work you need to build a love map.

A love map is where you store all the important information about your spouse. This includes their past experiences, their hopes and dreams for the future and everything else in between. Gottman says that when you decide to spend your life with someone you hand them a map to your inner world.

If you need help building a love map he has a lot of exercises in his book that can help you get to know your spouse better or analyze how well you currently know each other.

My husband and I started out as best friends. When we were in college I was actually dating other people but when I got sick or something exciting happened in my life, Jeff (my husband) was the one that I would run to to tell or get comfort from, not my current boyfriend. After doing this for about a year I decided to give him a chance in the romance department. I feel that because we started out as friends and have remained each other’s best friends over the years, that we have an incredible love map that has sustained us through all of the trials that life has thrown at us. And believe me, we have had more than our fair share of trials.

I know this is supposed to be a marriage blog, but I already feel like I have a pretty solid marriage. As I have been studying these things I can’t help but extend these exercises to any relationship that you would like to strengthen. As I was studying Gottman’s work this week I couldn’t help but think of the poor relationship that I have with my special needs daughter and can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, doing some of these with her night just help strengthen our relationship. Her and I didn’t start out as friends like my husband and I did. She was adopted from Foster Care and her and I have a really rocky relationship, to put it lightly. I think that if I work on building a better love map with her that maybe I can be a better mom and it can help sustain us through the hard times.

I am going to start with small baby steps. Because of my daughter’s past and her disability I can’t move too fast with any of this because it will overwhelm her. Most babies come bonded to their mother’s but that bond was never formed with my daughter and her mother so she has attachment issues. But she has been in my family long enough that we can try to work on our relationship. One of the first things I am going to work on is the date part. Gottman suggests that couples go on weekly dates. He has rules for this though. It can’t be something like a movie. It has to be something that engages the two of you in activity or conversation.

Another thing that I will work on with her is doing the Love Map Game:

I know not all of the questions will apply to a mother-daughter relationship but I can talk to her about the ones that do apply. I will skip the ones that are inappropriate for this type of relationship.