Acts of Service and Receiving Gifts are both mine. How do I stay open to someone whose way of loving is mostly words, when words tend to feel like the beginning of something rather than the thing itself?

That gap you are describing is real. Acts of Service and Receiving Gifts are both tangible. Something gets done, something arrives, and you can point to it. Words do not land the same way, not because they mean less to the person saying them, but because your nervous system is wired to wait for the follow-through.

The problem is that for a words person, the words are the follow-through. The declaration is not a promissory note. It is the thing itself, already complete in their mind the moment they say it. So you are both telling the truth and missing each other by about three inches.

What helps is translating, not convincing

You are not going to stop being an Acts and Gifts person, and you probably should not try. What you can do is build a small habit of asking yourself, in the moment the words arrive: what would this person have had to feel before they said that. A words person who says "I am proud of you" is doing something that costs them attention and vulnerability. That is a form of effort. It does not look like showing up and fixing the thing, but it is not nothing either.

You are not lowering your standards. You are widening your translation.

The honest conversation is the other half

The other part of this is that staying open to someone does not mean pretending their way of loving is already enough for you. If you need the thing done occasionally, or the gift to be physical sometimes, saying so is not a complaint about their character. It is giving them a map.

Most people who lead with words are capable of stretching into other expressions when they understand what it actually means to the other person. They do not always know. The conversation where you say "words feel like a beginning to me, I need the thing sometimes too" is the most efficient path to getting it. Not the only path, but the fastest one.

Staying open is a practice, not a feeling

You will not feel open every day, and waiting to feel it before you act on it is the slowest route. Staying open is closer to a decision you make each morning than a state you arrive at once and keep. On the days the words feel thin, you come back to the translation question: what did it take for them to say that.

That is not self-abandonment. It is the work that real difference in loving styles actually requires.