Years ago a female friend asked me for advice.

Years ago a female friend asked me for advice.

Her boyfriend’s birthday was coming up and she wanted to do something special for him. “I don’t want to just buy him another gift because I never know what to get him” she said. “I want to do something that makes him feel loved. But when I asked him what he wanted, he just shrugged and said he is fine, that I he doesn’t need anything.”

So I told her, “Okay. Tell me something about him that most people don’t know. Something quirky, maybe something he is embarrassed about, even to you, but something he really loves.”

She laughed and said, “That’s easy. Star Wars.”

“Alright,” I said, “have you ever watched it with him?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t like aliens and monsters.”

I looked at her and said, “So the thing he absolutely LOVES, you’ve never been curious about? Do you realize the main character was probably one of his first role models? That his whole sense of adventure and meaning might be tied up in that story? And you’ve never been interested?”

Her face went quiet.

She had never thought of it like that.

So I gave her an assignment. “Here’s what you’re going to do. Before he comes home from work, get his favorite dinner ready. Put out anything Star Wars you can find. Play the Darth Vader soundtrack loud before he gets in the door. Have the first movie (the original of course, duh) cued up and ready to play. And when he walks in, be as excited and curious as if you are getting to know this man you love for the first time. Step into his world.”

She agreed. She did it.

The next day I texted her to ask how it went. Her reply was short: “I still don’t know what happened. He didn’t say a word for the first ten minutes. He didn’t even touch the food. I thought it was a disaster. Then twenty minutes in, he stopped the movie with tears in his eyes, turned to me, and he asked me to marry him...”

This is what happens when a woman makes the choice to love a man in the language of his world, not just hers.

If you find a good man with a good heart, and you learn how to love him in a way that touches his soul, you’ll unlock parts of him he doesn’t even know how to express.

And in that place, you’ll have a man who would do anything to keep you.